ABSTRACT

Ciphers were explicitly understood as materially instantiated in the body of the cipherer himself during early medieval period. The textual tradition of writing about and explaining ciphers is believed to begin in Italy with Cicco Simonetta's 1474 two-page tract featuring thirteen guidelines for substitution ciphers, published in Milan. This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book records the ways in which cryptography is at once a system for understanding global neighbors and communities—and divine messages in nature—by creating a unique shared language independent of national or ethnic symbolic systems, and also a means of hiding communication from outsiders and from the unsaved. The ciphers, and the acts of ciphering and deciphering, described in the book challenge the narrative of reading, and the chronology of reading practices, that has dominated our histories of literacy.