ABSTRACT
The legacy of Francis Bacon's work with signification and particularly his bilateral cipher can easily be picked out in seventeenth-century English cryptography. While the different fonts of Bacon's cipher call attention to a letter's "bilateral" participation in two distinct messages, their plurality in John Bulwer calls attention to the different modalities of meaning for gesture and description. Chirologia reads like an encyclopedia of gestures and includes discussions of their meanings as well as an impressive array of classical references. Perhaps the most surprising thing about Bulwer's Chirologia is not that it includes an alphabetic legend for reading select gestures but that the body of the text never speaks directly of its own cryptographic potential. Bulwer's text decodes and translates, rather than honors, the unique capacity of gesture, offering instead the dream of sensory substitution without a remainder signaled by the work's cover.
