Vt hkskdkxt: Early Medieval Cryptography, Textual Errors, and Scribal Agency

• Published in: Speculum Vol. 93; no. 4; p. 975
• Main Author: Saltzman, Benjamin A
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Cambridge Medieval Academy of America 01.10.2018
• Subjects: Contextualism; Cryptography; Early Middle Ages; Errors; Inscriptions; Medieval period; Monks
• ISSN: 0038-7134; 2040-8072
• DOI: 10.1086/698861

Countless cryptographic specimens survive in a great variety of medieval manuscripts, found at the center of pages and in their margins, as colophons, acrostics, and solutions to riddles, as glosses and scribal notes, and occasionally as examples in descriptive tracts on the practice and purpose of cryptography itself; they are found as often in manuscripts from the ninth century as they are in manuscripts from the fourteenth; as often from England as from the Continent; as often in Latin as in the vernacular. But despite their prevalence and diversity, these encrypted bits of text often go unnoticed, handled scantly and inconsistently in modern editions and the subject of relatively few scholarly studies. My purpose here is to demonstrate that even though the cryptographic inscriptions found in medieval manuscripts are often easily deciphered and even though they rarely point to a sophisticated form of secret communication, these encryptions are not necessarily or merely the work of a "bored monk" seeking to "amuse himself." Instead they command careful attention both to extreme details and to the broader contexts in which they are found. This article concerns the various kinds of errors--accidental and deliberate, real and misattributed, scribal and editorial--that inevitably and pervasively creep into nearly every instance of medieval cryptographic writing. In other words, these errors often make medieval cryptography more sophisticated than it appears and are key to understanding the significance of cryptography in medieval sources and scribal culture. Such errors have the potential to tell us a great deal about the minds and habits of scribes as they undertook the task of encryption.