Readers looking for hidden wisdom needed ways to distinguish a difficult book from a deceptive one. Johannes Trithemius (1462–1516), the Benedictine abbot of Sponheim, made that task unusually complicated. His Steganographia appeared to teach communication through spirits, with names and invocations that suggested dangerous religious knowledge. The text also concealed methods of secret writing. A passage could be doing something quite different from what its surface invited a reader to believe.
Concealed authorship presented another problem in his histories. Trithemius introduced Hunibald, a supposed ancient chronicler, as a witness to the origins of the Franks. Hunibald supplied a remote past extending toward Troy, supported by the kind of names and succession lists that made a national history look well documented. He appeared among genuine authorities, so that the invented witness benefited from the company in which Trithemius placed him.
There was no independent Hunibald for readers to consult. The history depended on the abbot who claimed to transmit it, just as the apparent meaning of the cipher book depended on how its reader approached the text. These were different undertakings, and a concealed message is not the same thing as a forged chronicle. Together, however, they made Trithemius a particularly difficult guide to the learned world he helped preserve.
His reputation also brought younger scholars to him. Cornelius Agrippa (1486–1535) sent an early work on magic for his advice in 1510, giving us a documented connection between the abbot’s circle and a book that would reach a much larger audience. Agrippa’s undertaking raised the question that concealment had postponed. If ancient knowledge included powers that a reader could put to use, how much of it should appear in print, and who should be trusted with it?