26-11-2018, 07:54 PM
Quote:Cryptographic handwriting was extremely rare in the late Middle Ages because virtually everything was written by Roman Catholics who, being in charge of the Inquisition, had no reason to be deceptive or evasive. Thus, you should realize that you might not have as much relevant experience as you think.
That's not true at all. I constantly come across cryptographic writing in manuscripts. Not only did they frequently use substitution codes (especially one in which only the vowels are substituted), they liked to insert anacrostics into the text as well.
They also liked to hide their names in the text near the end of manuscripts. Monks were supposed to be humble, so in some sects, you weren't allowed to show vanity by signing your work, but after laboring for months or years over a long manuscript, some monks simply couldn't resist, so they would code their names into one of the end paragraphs. Some have been discovered and there are probably many more that haven't been deciphered yet.
Codes were also found in documents with alchemical references.
There was nothing uncommon about ciphers in the Middle Ages. What was rare was difficult ciphers. Most of them were simple substitution codes or first-letter anacrostics. Also rare were manuscripts where there was a lot of cipher text (usually it's just a small amount), but they do exist.