ABSTRACT
Sarah Covington, in her discussion of the writing of violence during the 1640s in England and Ireland, stresses the importance of attending to genre when examining even those historical documents that seem 'neutral'. 'The scale and internecine nature of violence as it unfolded on English soil may have generated a plethora of commentary', Covington writes, 'but it also produced a linguistic crisis, as writers found themselves unable to rely on previous frameworks to convey a violence that had turned inexplicable, even meaningless'. Cryptography manuals of this period reenact a theological argument within the context of desperate situations: many of the examples of correspondence they include are, without instruction, unintelligible. The appeal of cryptography for Wilkins, as he explains in his note 'To the Reader' at the beginning of Mercury, is that it offers a means of expression during times of isolation, confrontation, and violence.
