Secret Messages in a Miniature Qur'an

31 May 2023

Photo: Bodleian Library

A double page of the miniature Qur'an

At the Bodleian Library in Oxford, two members of the Cluster made a remarkable find: written on the pages of a miniature Qur’an, they found an encrypted message from the 16th century. Patiently, they decoded the encrypted text. Yet, the solution of this puzzle confronted them with many new ones.

Three pages full of mysterious symbols in a miniature Qur’an in the Bodleian Library aroused the curiosity of the Islamic scholar Cornelius Berthold and his colleague, the archaeometrist Claudia Colini. Apparently, they were dealing with an encrypted text. Initial attempts based on the assumption that it was Arabic led to no result. Instead, the secret message turned out to be English. Based on the frequency of the characters used, the two researchers reconstructed the text – with a surprising result.

What they could now read turned out to be a eulogy to several well-known personalities of 16th-century England. Thomas More, Lord Chancellor of Henry VIII, came off particularly well, praised as ‘noble’, ‘wise’, and ‘virtuous’. The unknown author was no less taken with his daughter Margaret, who, they claimed, was unparalleled in both beauty and education.

For a subject of the England of the time – the text was written in 1531 –, these were rather uncontroversial views (only three years later, Thomas More lost the king’s favour, however, and was eventually beheaded in 1535), and certainly nothing that would have had to be kept secret by laborious encryption. In this respect, the answer to the first question – what was in the secret text? – raised numerous new questions: how did such a message get into a miniature Qur’an, of all things, and what was the purpose of the secret writing?

Berthold and Colini owe their collaboration on this topic to a happy coincidence: they used to work in neighbouring offices at CSMC and discovered the potential of this joint project in their everyday conversations – a nice example of the benefits of a cross-disciplinary research environment. They have recently published the results of their work on this peculiar written artefact in the journal Moreana. A brief and accessible account can also be found in the collection ‘Manuscript of the Month’.