A Cultural History of Early Modern English Cryptography Manuals

Katherine Ellison is Professor of English at Illinois State University, where she directs the Cipher Series Faculty Lectures in Intelligence and Cryptography and teaches courses in literature and culture of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Her first book, Fatal News: Reading and Information Overload in Early Eighteenth-Century Literature, was published in 2006.

Introduction: Crises of expression in seventeenth-century cryptography manuals 1. The structures of seventeenth-century cryptography manuals 2. Textual precedents and seventeenth-century cryptography manuals 3. Occult communication, the new sciences, and cryptography 4. Cryptography and universal language schemes 5. Trade security and intelligence as capital 6. Materializing intelligence 7. Typography and multimodality in cryptography manuals 8. Conclusion: Logistikon: the fate of cryptography