02-12-2025, 11:58 PM
The conversation here so far seems to have assumed there's a binary choice to be made between "straight from brain to vellum" and "rough draft on paper." But aren't there other possibilities besides those?
For example, what if some clever encipherment scheme involved moving tokens around a counting board (as people did at the time when working a problem in arithmetic) and then writing down the result only after it had been safely figured out?
There are plenty of "mathematical" schemes I could imagine for enciphering and deciphering text using counting boards. These processes might seem cumbersome to us, since we're not used to the technology -- but many people were quite adept at using counting boards in the fifteenth century and might have found this kind of work a lot more comfortable and familiar than, say, looking up values in a table.
Given such an arrangement, it might still have been advantageous to prepare a plaintext rough draft on paper, but what value would there have been in preparing an enciphered rough draft on paper?
This dynamic could explain the cases where it looks like text was written out in short discontinuous bursts, and it would solve the problem of how a moderately complex cipher could respect contingent line breaks without a writer risking the "insanity" of composing directly on vellum.
I'm not especially invested in the specific scheme I've just laid out. But if some details seem hard to square with either the "brain to vellum" or "rough draft on paper" position, maybe it's worth our while to try to think outside that box.
For example, what if some clever encipherment scheme involved moving tokens around a counting board (as people did at the time when working a problem in arithmetic) and then writing down the result only after it had been safely figured out?
There are plenty of "mathematical" schemes I could imagine for enciphering and deciphering text using counting boards. These processes might seem cumbersome to us, since we're not used to the technology -- but many people were quite adept at using counting boards in the fifteenth century and might have found this kind of work a lot more comfortable and familiar than, say, looking up values in a table.
Given such an arrangement, it might still have been advantageous to prepare a plaintext rough draft on paper, but what value would there have been in preparing an enciphered rough draft on paper?
This dynamic could explain the cases where it looks like text was written out in short discontinuous bursts, and it would solve the problem of how a moderately complex cipher could respect contingent line breaks without a writer risking the "insanity" of composing directly on vellum.
I'm not especially invested in the specific scheme I've just laid out. But if some details seem hard to square with either the "brain to vellum" or "rough draft on paper" position, maybe it's worth our while to try to think outside that box.