Morten St George Theory

[Morten St. George]

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.

I agree with that. I actually have a book on medieval codes and ciphers, which I did not find to be particularly helpful for decoding the VMS. I clearly misused the word 'cryptographic'. I really wasn't referring to codes and ciphers, but to deceptive and evasive writing in general. Once determined that the objective of the author of the marginalia was to inform us on how to decode the VMS, all items of doubt should be interpreted in that light. Even if a character looks a bit more like a Latin abbreviation than a VMS symbol, the overall objective might require that we give priority to the VMS symbol if that is more helpful for the decoding. Cryptic writing can be defined as efforts to lead unwelcome readers astray, and, of course, those efforts can include characters written in disguise.