Talk:Johannes Trithemius
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- His most famous work is Steganographia (written c.1499; published Frankfurt, 1606), a work superficially on cryptography, but containing a hidden treatise on black magic; this work lent its name to the modern field of steganography.
More or less copied from Talk:Steganography in the hope of greater exposure:
"I was under the impression that this claim - orginally made by the Catholic Church - had been refuted. It really is about cryptography - or more generally, 15th century information security, since it branches into peripheral areas such as training couriers to memorise messages. In particular, the so-called spells in Book III were shown by Jim Reed to be cryptograms. In fact many sites today invert the sense of the quote above, and say that it is ostensibly about magic but really about crypto. However I don't know all the details, so does anyone know if there are any parts of the book that are definitively about black magic?" Securiger 06:47, 27 Apr 2004 (UTC)
- The only stuff I've read about Trithemius is in David Kahn's The Codebreakers, where he says that Steganographia was in three books — the last one in particular contained no reference to cryptography but rather various occult things — and that Polygraphia was his major contribution to cryptography. I haven't heard of Jim Reed's work, is it online? — Matt 09:15, 28 Apr 2004 (UTC)
- Yes. Try [1] (http://www.dtc.umn.edu/~reedsj/steg.html) for links to articles, and [2] (http://www.post-gazette.com/healthscience/19980629bspirit1.asp) for a news article. Securiger 12:02, 28 Apr 2004 (UTC)
- In fact now I've gone and re-read Jim's article, my uncertainty evaporates; I will edit the article. Securiger 12:18, 28 Apr 2004 (UTC)
OK Jsimtech