Camille Desenclos
CRÉSAT (EA-3436), Université de Haute-Alsace, France
Ladda ner artikel
Ingår i: Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Historical Cryptology HistoCrypt 2018
Linköping Electronic Conference Proceedings 149:8, s. 9-17
NEALT Proceedings Series 34:8, p. 9-17
Publicerad: 2018-06-13
ISBN: 978-91-7685-252-1
ISSN: 1650-3686 (tryckt), 1650-3740 (online)
Neither political nor diplomatic historians can avoid working with enciphered sources. However, we mostly study their content and not their writing processes. In the wake of a new history of political information, ciphers and, more broadly, cryptographic usages, practices and cultures should be embraced by historians. By considering cryptographic sources as significant witnesses of a culture of political information, we can no longer look at them as information repositories or instances for cryptanalysis but as complex scientific and political objects. In that respect, Renaissance French ciphers form perfect study objects. They are not yet as complex and technical as in the mid-seventeenth or eighteenth century and show a representative variety of goals (political or diplomatic), systems (jargon, simple substitution, homophonic substitution, …) and usages. As any other early modern source, however, cryptographic sources are dispersed, incomplete and, sometimes, hardly understandable at first sight. By studying many ciphering tables, by observing encryption and decipherment practices within a correspondence, by matching the enciphered letters and the related ciphering table, by comparing cryptographic systems, we hope to rebuild, at least partly, the Renaissance French cryptographic practices.
François de Callières. 1716. De la manière de négocier avec les souverains. La Compagnie, Amsterdam.
Jean-Pierre Devos. 1950. Les chiffres de Philippe II (1555-1598) et du Despacho universal durant le XVIIe siècle. Académie royale de Belgique, Bruxelles.
Alain Hugon. 2004. Au service du Roi Catholique, “honorables ambassadeurs” et “divins espions”: représentations diplomatiques et service secret dans les relations hispano-françaises de 1598 à 1635. Casa de Velasquez, Madrid.
David Kahn. 1996. The Codebreakers. Simon and Schuster, New York.
Benedek Lang. 2014. “People’s Secrets: Towards a Social History of Early Modern Cryptography”. In The Sixteenth Century Journal. 45.2: 291-308.
Benedek Lang. 2018. “Real-Life Cryptology: Enciphering Practice in Early Modern Hungary”. In Katherine Ellison and Susan Kim (eds), A Material History of Medieval and Early Modern Ciphers: Cryptography and the History of Literacy. Routledge, New York/London, pages 223-240.
Karl de Leeuw. 2014. “Books, Science, and the Rise of the Black Chambers in Early Modern Europe”. In Anne-Simone Rous and Martin Mulsow (dir.), Geheime Post: Kryptologie und Steganographie der diplomatischen Korrespondenz europaïscher Höfe während der Frühen Neuzeit. Duncker & Humblot, Berlin, pages 87-99.
Claire Martin. 2010. Mémoires de Benjamin Aubéry du Maurier, ambassadeur protestant de Louis XIII (1566-1636). Droz, Genève.
Jacques de Monts-de-Savasse, “Les chiffres de la correspondance diplomatique des ambassadeurs d’Henri IV en l’année 1590”. In Pierre Albert (dir.). 1997. Correspondance jadis et naguère: congrès national des sociétés historiques et scientifiques. Comité des travaux historiques et scientifiques. Paris, pages 219-228.
Valérie Nachef, Jacques Patarin and Armel Dubois-Nayt. 2016. “Mary of Guise’s Enciphered Letters”. In Peter Y. A. Ryan, David Naccache and Jean-Jacques Quisquater (eds.). The New Codebreakers: Essays Dedicated to David Kahn on the Occasion of His 85th Birthday. Springer, Berlin, pages 3-24.
Jean-Michel Ribera. 2007. Diplomatie et espionnage: les ambassadeurs du roi de France auprès de Philippe II du traité du Cateau-Cambrésis (1559) à la mort de Henri III (1589). Honoré Champion, Paris.
Alain Tallon. 2010. L’Europe au XVIe siècle: États et relations internationales. Presses universitaires de France, Paris.
Blaise de Vigenère. 1586. Traicté des chiffres ou secretes manieres d’escrire. Abel L’Angelier, Paris.
