Construction, Use and Decipherment of Secret Languages in the 16th Century
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This article addresses the construction, use and decipherment of 16th century correspondence in Europe. The need to protect communication drove the development of encryption systems in the face of political, religious and war conflicts. The interception of coded letters was feared by monarchs and rulers, who had to hastily change the cipher to prevent the information from becoming known to unwanted readers. The testimonies studied, in Spanish, belong to the funds of the General Archive of Simancas. The objective of the study is to know how an artificial language, agreed upon among a few users, is constructed. The methodology brings together text editing and the techniques of historical cryptography. The results are interesting for Philology, History and Historical Cryptography.
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(c) Júlia Benavent Benavent, 2025
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