A Cultural History of Early Modern English Cryptography Manuals

Katherine Ellison (Autor)

Buch | Hardcover

232 Seiten

2016
Routledge (Verlag)
978-1-4724-5764-6 (ISBN)

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During and after the English civil wars, between 1640 and 1690, an unprecedented number of manuals teaching cryptography were published, almost all for the general public. While there are many surveys of cryptography, none pay any attention to the volume of manuals that appeared during the seventeenth century, or provide any cultural context for the appearance, design, or significance of the genre during the period. On the contrary, when the period’s cryptography writings are mentioned, they are dismissed as esoteric, impractical, and useless. Yet, as this book demonstrates, seventeenth-century cryptography manuals show us one clear beginning of the capitalization of information. In their pages, intelligence—as private message and as mental ability—becomes a central commodity in the emergence of England’s capitalist media state. Publications boasting the disclosure of secrets had long been popular, particularly for English readers with interests in the occult, but it was during these particular decades of the seventeenth century that cryptography emerged as a permanent bureaucratic function for the English government, a fashionable activity for the stylish English reader, and a respected discipline worthy of its own genre.

These manuals established cryptography as a primer for intelligence, a craft able to identify and test particular mental abilities deemed "smart" and useful for England’s financial future. Through close readings of five specific primary texts that have been ignored not only in cryptography scholarship but also in early modern literary, scientific, and historical studies, this book allows us to see one origin of disciplinary division in the popular imagination and in the university, when particular broad fields—the sciences, the mechanical arts, and the liberal arts—came to be viewed as more or less profitable.

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.

Table of contents to come

Erscheinungsdatum	25.05.2016
Zusatzinfo	17 Halftones, black and white; 17 Illustrations, black and white
Verlagsort	London
Sprache	englisch
Maße	156 x 234 mm
Gewicht	476 g
Themenwelt	Geschichte ► Allgemeine Geschichte ► Neuzeit (bis 1918)
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Geschichte ► Regional- / Ländergeschichte
	Geschichte ► Teilgebiete der Geschichte ► Kulturgeschichte
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Anglistik / Amerikanistik
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Literaturwissenschaft
	Informatik ► Theorie / Studium ► Kryptologie
ISBN-10	1-4724-5764-1 / 1472457641
ISBN-13	978-1-4724-5764-6 / 9781472457646
Zustand	Neuware