ABSTRACT
Almost all studies of and in the discipline of cryptography written since the seventeenth century, including those that became best sellers in the twentieth, share similar tropes, narrative conventions, and even examples with their seventeenth-century ancestors. This chapter describes how Morland's New Method reenacts ciphering and deciphering as experimental disciplines. Most authors of cryptography manuals even into the late twentieth century begin with a broad historical overview of the discipline, reaching back to Egyptian hieroglyphs and scripture. The chapter also includes a history of hieroglyphs and the alphabet that is much in line with the history of hieroglyphs and alphabetic language and writing that Wilkins includes in Mercury to argue that cryptography is the inevitable next step in human communication. The manuals are conscious and manipulative of their own physical structures. Wilkins begins Mercury with emphasis on his own wonder after reading Francis Godwin's Nuncius inanimatus and his decision to learn cryptography as a kind of testing of Godwin's hypotheses.
