Ciphers, Codes and Notes: Crafting Knowledge in the Medieval and Modern Worlds
Visit our new online exhibition – Crafting, Codes and Notes: Crafting Knowledge in the Medieval and Modern Worlds
This fascinating exhibition is organised around key themes relating to early medieval intellectual culture. It comprises 10 sections exploring reproductions of early medieval manuscripts with glosses, diagrams, illuminations, ciphers and mystic writing. The exhibition offers a virtual tour of some of the most highly-prized early medieval manuscripts preserved in Switzerland, Austria, Germany, Italy, and England.
Byrhtferth’s diargrams of the cosmos. By permission of the President and Fellows of St John’s College, Oxford. 
God on the Page – St Gallen, Stiftsbibliothek, Cod Sang. 23, page 237; Photograph: Codices Electronici AG, www.e-codices.ch
For the physical exhibition in the McClay Library (provisionally scheduled November 2020 – January 2021) these medieval materials will sit alongside modern examples of notetaking, debate, codebreaking and encryption. The modern examples are drawn from the works of the following literary figures connected with Belfast: Seamus Heaney, C.S. Lewis and Helen Waddell (manuscripts held in Special Collections). These writers were deeply indebted to the medieval past.
Seamus Heaney Manuscripts MS 20 (QUB Special Collections) 
Irish poet, translator and playwright Helen Waddell (1889-1965) MS 18 (QUB Special Collections)
The exhibition has been funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) in collaboration with the Leverhulme Trust. All text written, and images compiled by Dr Sinead O’Sullivan and Dr Ciaran Arthur, Queen’s University Belfast.
This exhibition “Ciphers, Codes and Notes” is fascinating and most informative. I have long been interested in encryption; if the purpose of language is to make meaning crystal clear then encryption seems to me to be the opposite use of language because it tries to obfuscate the meaning. If music is thought of as a language, since it also uses signs linked to sounds, then it fills a unique place, because although it is enigmatic, it can release in us deep emotions which move us, and which we seem to be unable to articulate in any other way.
There are striking similarities between the puzzles used by mediaeval writers and musicians. Just as you can have palindromes, so in music you can have music in retrograde, where the theme is played in reverse order. One could argue that Schoenberg’s Tone Row compositions are an example of the fascination with manipulating the basic row of sounds until they are unrecognisable. Of course it is well known that many composers have used the notes that spell the name of the composer B A C H (Bb in German) as the foundation of compositions.
The Music of the Spheres is interesting because you can find a similar idea in other cultures, most notably in ancient Chinese music. The Confucian view being that music’s purpose was to educate and therefore in religious ceremonies if the correct notes were used in the correct combinations then the Government would be in harmony and the people will be happy.
Thank you so much for your interesting comments. A captivating way to think of music and how it links to medieval thought and culture.