John Dee (1527–1609) was Elizabeth I’s natural philosopher, mathematician and astrologer, and an active alchemist. A surviving notebook, passed to his son Arthur Dee and thence through several alchemical hands, contained a passage in an unidentified cipher. With Sarah Lang and Megan Piorko, I identified the cipher and recovered the plaintext, which fits the alchemical programme of the surrounding notebook pages.
The paper below sets out the codicological context of the notebook, the identification of the cipher, and the method used to recover the plaintext.
Bean, R., Lang, S. and Piorko, M. (2022). Solving an Alchemical Cipher in a Shared Notebook of John and Arthur Dee. In Proceedings of HistoCrypt 2022.
Conference talk: HistoCrypt 2022 (R. Bean, presenter).
See also the full publications list and the presentations archive.