972Unsolved Historical Ciphers
1582 … E.T. … Uriel … Reuchlin · Reconciliatio Kelliana
longhand names inside shorthand strokes

Sloane MS 3188 · notes on John Dee's actions with spirits · English shorthand · 17th century (leaves dated to 1595)

Shippen's shorthand notes on Dee

British Library, Sloane MS 3188 ff. 109–169 · DECODE R8506–R8530, catalogued as 25 ciphertexts with no decipherment on record, "unknown sender to unknown recipient"

The leaves are a reader's notes on Dee's spirit diaries and on his writings, in a stroke shorthand. They contain no cipher, so there is nothing to decipher; the shorthand itself was not transcribed.

Daniel Bourdeau · posted · updated

Method: not a cipher

Summary. DECODE lists 25 records from BL Sloane MS 3188 (R8506–R8530; entry 139 alone was 23 records, 67 pages) as "Non-decrypted" (no decipherment on record), with no sender, recipient or language, and the note "Uncertain what these documents exactly are". They entered the catalogue as items 138 and 139 on those metadata. Sloane MS 3188 is John Dee's own record of his conferences with spirits, 1581–83, on ff. 4–108. The British Library describes the leaves that follow (ff. 109–169) as notes in cipher by William Shippen. The DECODE records are those leaves, one record per leaf. Three of them were viewed here. The running text is a 17th-century English stroke shorthand, with vowels marked by dots and small letters set around the consonant strokes. Angel names, Latin phrases, titles, page references and years are in longhand. f. 109 indexes Dee's Actions (Actio 1–5, Uriel, Raphael, Salamian, E.T. for Edward Kelley, Reconciliatio Kelliana). f. 155 lists Dee's writings year by year, from Mercurius coelestis (1549) to the Euclid preface (1570). f. 137 is a note on Kelley, Pucci and Prague dated 1595. Nothing here is enciphered. Transcribing the notes needs the shorthand system identified, and they comment on texts that are already printed. The target is closed as not a cipher.
Sloane MS 3188 f. 109r, right column: shorthand strokes with longhand years 1569, 1579, 1581, 1582 and E.T.
f. 109r, the chronology column: years in the margin, shorthand strokes with vowel marks, and longhand E.T., Uriel and Reuchlin. Image: British Library, Sloane MS 3188 f. 109r, via DECODE R8506.

01 The leaves

Each DECODE record is one leaf, or a pair of conjugate leaves, of ff. 109–169 (R8506 = f. 109, … R8530 = f. 169). DECODE dates only two of them, R8509 (f. 137, 1595) and R8520 (f. 155, 1594). Those two became a separate catalogue entry (138), and the rest became entry 139. They are one set of notes in one hand.

02 Why this is shorthand, not a cipher

The script is a small set of connected strokes. A dot, a comma or a tiny letter placed above, beside or below a stroke gives the vowel, and many words are a single mark. That is the mechanism of the English "character" shorthands of the 17th century: Shelton's Tachygraphy, Rich's system and their relatives, the family Pepys wrote his diary in. It fits William Shippen (1635–1693). The writer switches to longhand wherever a proper name, a Latin title or a number would be hard to recover from strokes. A cipher hides a fixed message behind a key. These strokes write the sounds of English in an abbreviated way. Transcribing them means identifying the system and learning its signs.

The notes are also secondary. They index and summarise Dee's diaries, which Whitby edited in 1982 and Casaubon printed in part in 1659, and they list Dee's own writings. Nothing is concealed that is not available in those texts.

03 What stays open

04 Sources

Notes in the repository folder sloane3188/.