History's most mysterious manuscripts

Welcome to the History Extra podcast. What do exploding bats and amphibious galleons have in common? They're both fascinating features of some of the world's most mysterious manuscripts, as revealed by journalist and author Gary J. Shaw in his book Cryptic. From the hoaxes of Renaissance Spain to John Dee's angelic communications, Shaw unravels the allure of text shrouded in secrecy, explores how codes and ciphers reflected power and performance, and investigates the stories of those who created, concealed, or forged these intriguing works.

He was speaking to Emily Breffit. We are talking all about your book Cryptic, which is all about some of the world's most mysterious manuscripts. So to start off, can I just ask you, why are we so fascinated by mysteries from history? Well, I mean, I think like all humans, we kind of just can't cope with the idea of losing something, right? The idea that, you know, that something is misplaced even in our own living room, like the remote control for a TV or something, something simple like that just drives people crazy.

And so I think history has the same sort of impact on the mind here, that there's something that's out there that we really should know, but we don't know anymore. And frankly, we want to know what that is. We want to answer this question and solve this problem, and anything mysterious could just rips you as well, you know, they're kind of more unusual or anything strange or unique. It also has that added allure of just trying to say, you know, it grabs you and makes you want to look at it deeper.

We already have this episode, so unlocking it is cheap and permanent: the full transcript (44 minutes, 8,921 words), segment and word-level timestamps, and .txt, .srt, .vtt and word-level JSON downloads, as many times as you like, forever.

No account needed, we create one from your checkout email. With credits it is 1 credit; packs start at 5 episodes for $3.49, and monthly plans are cheaper still.