24/03/2021

Misplaced? English Cipher Letter in French Archives

The cipher of a wholly enciphered letter in BnF fr.2988, f.1, was broken by Torbjörn Andersson in 2017. Unexpectedly, the plaintext turned out to be English. The recipient is called "your ...", and an obvious candidate is "your Majesty" (Henry VIII). Such an identification is supported by references to "your realm" in the text. But the text also refers to "your son". Although Henry VIII famously lacked a son until 1537, I noticed that he had a bastard son known as Henry FitzRoy.
I posted my decipherment in a new article "Misplaced? English Cipher Letter in French Archives" to help historians to identify the nature of this letter.

Another reason of this post is its possible relation to another undeciphered ciphertext signed Hieronimo Ranzo on the following folio (see "Venetian Ciphers with Superscripts"). Since f.1 and f.2 are treated as one item in catalog information, I wondered whether one is an enclosure of the other. But at least the decipherment of f.1 does not appear to refer to an enclosure.

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