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.
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