Ben Jonson, Encryption, and the Hypnerotomachia Poliphilii

The anonymous Hypnerotomachia Poliphilii (“The Strife of Love in a Dream by Poliphilus”) is among the most famous books of the medieval age, with influence radiating out from Venice, where it was first published in 1499, throughout Europe and into England well through the period of civil war and commonwealth (1640-1660) and has maintained a strong following ever since among bibliographers and readers.

My interest in this book is partly motivated by reading A. W. Johnson’s 1994 Ben Jonson: Poetry and Architecture, which contains extensive commentary on the influence of Hypnerotomachia on Jonson’s poetics. More generally, the book explains Jonson’s poetic practice, throughout his career as a writer and public intellectual, of applying architectural and numerical structures in his poetry in order to endow a work with “symbolic numbers.”

Johnson devotes more than a whole chapter to the discussion of Hypnerotomachia‘s influence on Jonson’s theoretical precepts. It was one of handful of key texts that informed Jonson’s wide-ranging experimentation in applying the ut architectura poesia (“as in architecture, so in poetry”) concept.

Along with the idea of a poetry based in number and inspired by architecture, Jonson was also heir to the commonplace book tradition and its association with memory training.

Jonson’s over-riding purpose as a poet was to “place invention” (see his translation of the Ars Poetica ll ). It was Jonson’s usual practice was to follow the teachings of the medieval memory palace exponents like Bruno, Quintillian, or Rhetorica ad Herrenium — to “place invention” in an architectural context.

“Invention” means the idea of the poet (including, for example, jokes). Jonson’s poetic schema in its most basic form requires just two things: an invention and a place (for the invention).

Jonson was of course at certain times in his life a journeyman bricklayer, so his interest in architecture would have been reinforced through practical experience as well as theoretical interest. He read carefully and left annotations in at least two different translations of Vitruvius, among many other books that helped to cultivate his ideals of proportionality, symmetry, and numerical design.

But Hypnerotomachia is unique among the books Jonson used to study concepts of the relationship between form and content. It is not a manual to instruct a trade, but a medieval fantasy of the search for love. In Hypnerotomachia the protagonist wanders through a wilderness occupied by a series of miraculous buildings, lavishly illustrated with instances of art in nature and nature in art. It is a highly complex text, juxtaposing the verbal with the visual, and exploring a whole range of mathematical and architectonic imagery. A steady stream of books and articles about it now includes 21st century mathematics journals.

Along with around sixty others from all over the world, I recently completed a six day course in early modern cryptography taught by Dr. Bill Sherman through the Warburg Institute.

The Warburg Institute is “one of the world’s leading centres for studying the interaction of ideas, images and society.” I’ve known about Warburg for quite a few years, having read books and articles by the Institute’s founders Erwin Panofsky and Ernst Cassirer, but this was my first close experience with the Institute as it today functions to fulfill its mission in cyberspace.

The course was a lot of fun and highly educational. I would certainly do it again.

Among other useful parts of the course design was breakout rooms in which groups of 5-7 were given texts or problems to analyze before reporting back to the group. Sherman was a gracious manager of this process as well as a fine scholar and lecturer.

But I do have suggestions for how such a course could be made better in the future if it entertained a wider field of interpretative approaches to the past. The authorship question is real, even if some continue to purport the contrary by dismissing evidence as “coincidence.”

In this blog entry I’ll focus on the first of two more specific examples of how such a future cyber-conclave might be enhanced: — include a serious discussion of the implications of Hypnerotomachia as a Renaissance model of literary encryption.

Given that Ben Jonson is a huge person of interest in the Shakespeare Authorship question, and given that Jonson owned and apparently annotated a copy of the 1545 edition of Hypnerotomachia, it cannot be without interest to the community of Jonson scholars that the book contains a very famous encryption that was known to some as early as a few years after the original anonymous edition of 1499.

The encryption is of the kind classified by experts as steganographic. Steganography is the art of encryption through a cognitive trick.

The purpose of steganography is to escape decryption not through a code or a visible sequence of nonsense characters that are impossible to “crack” but which indicates on its face the appearance of an encryption, but by escaping detection altogether in a document of deceptively innocuous and unproblematic content, concealing the existence of the encipherment itself.

Figure 1 shows the Decorated Capitals prefixing the successive chapter titles of the 1499 (and, presumably, 1545) editions of Hypnerotomachia. They are arranged in order but the words they spell out have been distinguished in this highly fascinating example of early modern encryption.

The book’s designer, presumably the author himself, or at least assisted by the author, was heir to the high medieval traditions of illuminated manuscript production.

In this application of that tradition the decorative device of the illuminated capitals of successive chapters have been suborned to spell out the author’s “inside message.” In the capitals that begin each chapter he spells out his infinite love for a woman named Polia and gives his own name as Francesco Colonna, a monk vowed to chastity. The purposeful character of this encryption interlocks with the text by the fact that Polia is a character in the narrative, the beloved of Poliphilus. This interlocking supplies an aesthetic wholeness that must be a prime criteria of any literary encryption.

Understandably, this book was an object of fascination for many highly literary minds of the 16th century.

In the 21st century debate continues over the authorship of the mysterious book, with a number of highly qualified scholars insisting that the architectural and mathematical aspects of the book are so sophisticated that it must have been written by the great architect and polymath Leon Battista Alberti and not by Colonna.

The method of this encryption is very simple and was noticed quite early in the book’s history (in or before 1512). Ben Jonson owned a copy of the 1545 edition, and the book was translated into English and published by R.D. (thought to stand for Robert Dallington, an adherent of the Essex faction) in 1594.

The prejudice against Hypnerotomachia among English professors and their Stratfordian apologists in other fields is longstanding. In his The Codebreakers (a magnificent book flawed by its inherited Stratfordian assumptions) David Kahn includes Hypnerotomachia only as a foil to his primary purpose in a chapter titled “The Pathology of Cryptology,” which is primarily devoted to beating the dead horse of Baconian cipher-mongering.

Kahn unfortunately fails to make the obvious point that the existence of the encryption in such a prominent and widely discussed Renaissance book has implications for assessing the currency and forms that steganographic thought may have assumed in the 16th century.

The Warburg course included a whole 2 hour session on the fascinating diversity and ingenuity of early modern Steganographic schemes published in such cryptography manuals like Della Porta (1563) or Selenus (1624).

Unfortunately, because the discussion of the Shakespeare question was relegated to the last session of the Warburg course, scrambled in with anagrams, there was no opportunity to assess the broader implications of the popularity of such steganographic schemes in early modern Europe or to suggest that Stratfordian scholars may not have already discovered all there is to know about the purposes to which they may have been put.