Solved: The Ciphers in Book III of Trithemius's Steganographia

Jim Reeds's Solved, the Ciphers in Book III of Trithemius's Steganographia, published in Cryptologia in 1998, is the peer reviewed cryptanalysis that broke the concealed cipher system in the third book of Johannes Trithemius's circa 1500 work on magic, a puzzle that had stood unsolved in the mainstream literature for nearly five hundred years. Its strength is that it is a rigorous, verifiable cryptanalytic solution published in the field's own specialist peer reviewed journal. Its limit, worth naming plainly, is priority: Thomas Ernst had already published the same solution independently, in German, in the journal Daphnis in 1996, two years before Reeds's English language paper, working the problem separately as a graduate student and initially attracting less notice; Reeds's paper itself is accurate and rigorous, but a claim crediting the discovery to Reeds alone omits Ernst's earlier, equally real, priority.