Steganography Vindicated, Unlocked and Illustrated

...understanding was slower and whose will was more prone to rashness, they confirmed that he was a magician and performed those deeds through the service of spirits. Thus it happened that, until now, he has been publicly regarded and proclaimed as a Magician and Necromancer A practitioner of "black magic" involving communication with the dead., and even dragged before the Inquisition. Turning these things over in my mind, MOST EMINENT PRINCE, after I had become acquainted with the life of Trithemius Johannes Trithemius (1462–1516), a famous Benedictine abbot, scholar, and cryptographer. and found nothing in the perusal of his volumes except that which most fully breathed the highest piety, devotion, and the other virtues of a Christian man, a Monk, a Priest, and an Abbot, I saw how unjust, rash, empty, and frivolous this common opinion was. I firmly resolved to apply whatever talent nature has bestowed upon me, or whatever erudition study has added, entirely toward vindicating the name of such a great man from such great slanders.

Nor was the effort in vain; for within the space of six weeks, I discovered not only the genuine key to the Steganographia Trithemius's most famous work, which appeared to be about magic but was actually about secret writing. but also the solution to those things which Trithemius—to the admiration and suspicion of all—proposed and promised in his letters to Arnold Bostius A fellow monk and correspondent of Trithemius. and in many passages of his Polygraphia Another foundational work on cryptography.. While I was joyful and congratulating myself on such a happy success in a matter I had deemed impossible, I was nevertheless deeply anxious about the method of making this discovery of mine public. I wished for the innocence of Trithemius to be established throughout the entire world as quickly as possible, without fear that it might be suppressed at its very birth by the cruelty of the malevolent, or hidden away through contempt for an unlearned writer. At last, MOST EMINENT PRINCE, I took heart on that day when, by the unanimous votes of the Capitulars of Mainz The high-ranking clergy of the Cathedral of Mainz., you were elevated to the Holy See of Mainz...