Rudolf II of Habsburg (1552–1612) ran his court at Prague Castle as a centre for alchemical, astrological and occult enquiry. A small bronze handbell, attributed to the Emperor’s alchemical circle, carries an inscription engraved in an unusual script around its lip. With Corinna Gannon and Sarah Lang, I deciphered the inscription and identified the reference.
The engraved glyphs mix genuine alchemical symbols with an enciphered alphabet. The paper below sets out how we separated the symbolic from the enciphered material, identified the cipher type, and recovered the plaintext.
Bean, R., Gannon, C. and Lang, S. (2023). The cipher of Emperor Rudolf II’s ‘Alchemical Handbell’. In Proceedings of HistoCrypt 2023.
Conference talk: HistoCrypt 2023, Munich.
See also the full publications list and the presentations archive.