972Cyphersolver
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

At a glanceNot a cipher

The document
DECODE records R8506–R8530 (25 leaves, ff. 109–169) of notes on John Dee’s spirit conferences, listed as “Non-decrypted” with no sender, recipient or language. Three were viewed.
Where
British Library, Sloane MS 3188 ff. 109–169, which the Library describes as notes in cipher by William Shippen; DECODE catalogue items 138 and 139.
The cipher
None: the running text is a 17th-century English stroke shorthand, with vowels marked by dots and small letters. Angel names, Latin phrases, titles and years are in longhand.
What it says
f. 109 indexes Dee’s Actions; f. 155 lists Dee’s writings year by year; f. 137 is a note on Kelley, Pucci and Prague dated 1595.
Still open
The shorthand system is not identified and the notes are not transcribed; the writer is given as Shippen by the Library, not checked. A DECODE correction is queued for all 25 records.
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 targets/sloane3188/.