ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the mental process of creating and solving a cipher as it was pedagogically presented as a visual, material display of mental prowess through, in particular, the acts of recombination and pattern recognition. It conceptualizes the materialization of the cognitive skills required to decipher, such as pattern recognition and recombination, and the implications of that materialization. The chapter looks closely at the rhetorical framework of the manuals as they present the mental work of deciphering in the terms of observable, physical, multisensory labor. It surveys some of these multisensory instructional exercises and examples and the mechanical means by which cryptographers attempted to extend the capabilities of the human interface. Of particular interest in the seventeenth-century manuals is the foregrounding of theories of materiality and the functions of the senses in human communication.
