Segmentazione testuale in lettere di cancelleria dell’età premoderna

Abstract

In Italy, many messages (or parts of messages) in the course of political and diplomatic communication in the 15th and 16th centuries were sent in ciphered form to their recipients. As part of the monoalphabetic procedure, which was widely used at the time, in addition to the replacement of graphemes, some of the writing features of the text were often modified in the encoding process to prevent code breaking. Some of these changes concerned markings indicating the logical and morpho-syntactic structure of the text, for example, the encoded version was usually written without spaces and punctuation marks. In the course of decoding the text reduced in this way, the structural features had to be reinserted, since their absence significantly impeded the interpretation of the text to correspond to the sender’s intention. This study examines Italian-language manuscripts written in cipher form with focus on the occurrence of text segmentation elements aimed at representing the structural characteristics of the script, i.e. facilitating and guiding the interpretation.