During the many years Christina von Nolcken, associate professor emerita of English, taught a course on Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales at UChicago, she liked taking students on what she calls “little jaunts”—trips to the Hanna Holborn Gray Special Collections Research Center. There she would show them highlights from the library’s Chaucer collection, including the famous eight-volume work The Text of the Canterbury Tales, Studied on the Basis of All Known Manuscripts (University of Chicago Press, 1940) by scholars and UChicago professors John Manly and Edith Rickert, PhD 1899. In discussing this scholarly work with her classes, von Nolcken began to realize she knew more about Manly—whose portrait hangs in the English department in Walker Hall—than Rickert, whose face she had never seen.

Von Nolcken went searching in Special Collections for photos but found far more. Rickert, she discovered, was beautiful, well traveled, and well liked, and her writings conveyed a kind of crackling intensity and thoughtfulness. “I thought, This is a really interesting woman,” von Nolcken says. Her initial curiosity moved her to become Rickert’s biographer, and in 2024 she published The “Lives” and Writings of Edith Rickert (1871–1938): Novelist, Cryptologist, and World-Class Chaucerian (Palgrave Macmillan).

The book reveals an accomplished scholar and writer who was also partly responsible for what has been considered the most important act of American code breaking in World War I. Rickert’s scholarly and cryptographic achievements are sometimes not given the same credit as those of her male collaborators, an oversight von Nolcken’s biography seeks to rectify.

Rickert was born in 1871 and grew up first in the small Ohio town of Canal Dover (a place that later inspired her first published story, “Among the Iron-Workers,” which won a competition for short fiction by college students in 1890) and later in Chicago. Her early life was happy but punctuated with tragedy—three of her six younger siblings did not survive to adulthood, and her mother died when Rickert was 21.

When she matriculated at Vassar on a full scholarship in 1887, Rickert was the first in her family to go to college. She graduated in 1891 as valedictorian. She then returned to Chicago to teach high school and pursue a PhD in Middle English at the University of Chicago. Dissertation research called her abroad, and on her 25th birthday she set sail for Europe to explore the British Museum’s collection of medieval romances. It was in London that she met medical student Kate Platt, later a distinguished physician and always Rickert’s friend.

Rickert’s time abroad influenced her as both a novelist and a scholar. On an 1897 trip to the Scottish island of Barra, she collected local stories that she later spun into fiction. By this point she had been publishing her creative writing for several years, but her reimagined regional lore gave her more recognition and some small compensation. Other writers would later receive more attention for folklore-inspired fiction, but, von Nolcken says, “Edith was out there on the cutting edge for this sort of thing.”

Back in the United States, Rickert was appointed to an instructorship at Vassar in 1897. The summer of 1899 took her to Chicago to defend her PhD. Among her examiners was John Manly, the “brand-new whiz kid at the University,” as von Nolcken describes him, and the first head of the English department. Right away Rickert “fell desperately in love,” von Nolcken says. But she nevertheless decided to rejoin Platt in England and establish herself as a writer.

Rickert and Platt moved into Tibbles, a “tumbledown house” in Kent, where they integrated themselves into the local community and adopted a cat and dog. Rickert published five well-received novels, several works of scholarship, and many short stories. Although Rickert “was always hankering after the guy,” von Nolcken considers those years in England the happiest of Rickert’s life.

In 1909 Rickert returned to America to finance the educations of her three younger sisters. Then, when the United States joined World War I in 1917, she followed Manly to Washington, DC, to become a code breaker. She had gained some code breaking experience that same year from her work on the Voynich manuscript, a 15th-century document written in a (still uncracked) cipher, and she had picked up German at Vassar and on her first post-Vassar trip to Europe. The US Department of Justice’s Bureau of Investigation (now the Federal Bureau of Investigation) had reached out to Manly to head the Code and Cipher Section of the US Army Military Intelligence Division (also called MI-8 or the Black Chamber), and Rickert was eager to make use of her own talents.

Information about Rickert’s code breaking is hard to come by because the 1917 Espionage Act put limits on most outside communication. But it’s clear that she took to the work with diligence and zeal. Most importantly, after three days of nonstop effort, she and Manly broke the Waberski cipher, found on a paper sewn into the clothes of a German spy intercepted in February 1918 at the US–Mexico border. The decrypted message concerned Germany’s attempt to ally with Mexico, reinforcing information in the Zimmermann telegram cracked by the British the year before.

Rickert’s role in breaking the Waberski cipher has been largely overlooked by historians. (She is also not widely recognized for her work in the pre-war years revising—and helping write—a series of English grammar and composition textbooks that bear Manly’s name.) In fact, after publishing the biography, von Nolcken found a letter in which Rickert says she did all the work on the cipher. “I can believe her,” says von Nolcken. For years, if Manly publicly acknowledged Rickert’s contributions at all, it was as his bright student rather than a colleague. “It’s only after the period in Washington that … he started going out of his way to make sure she was credited,” von Nolcken says.

It is at this point, too, that Rickert’s professional and personal relationship with Manly, as von Nolcken writes, “reached the equilibrium that as far as we know lasted for the rest of their lives,” remaining close friends and research partners until Rickert’s death.

After the war, Rickert supported herself by writing textbooks, children’s books, and book reviews, though she craved a return to academic work. She got her wish around 1923, when she and Manly embarked on what von Nolcken considers “the most ambitious humanistic project of the early 20th century,” their critical edition of The Canterbury Tales. For this they had to locate and examine every one of the more than 80 extant manuscripts of the tales, in order to reconstruct the version left by Chaucer’s very first scribe.

The project meant traveling to archives in Europe. It also required funding. Relying on a new technology that they knew from their war work, Rickert and Manly needed to purchase photostats of all the manuscripts so that their assistants could collate them in what became known as the “Chaucer Laboratory” at the University of Chicago. Funding came mainly from the Rockefeller Foundation, though Rickert and Manly had to supplement what they received by teaching six months of each year. Both now taught at the University, where Rickert—like von Nolcken—became an associate professor (later a full professor) focusing on medieval English literature. “I had her job, in a sense,” von Nolcken says.

After years of worsening health, Rickert died in 1938, two years before the eight-volume Canterbury Tales was published. While the edition is not used widely today, von Nolcken believes that “no one has edited The Canterbury Tales with more care.”

There was another project that remained incomplete when Rickert died: “My Book,” treating her own life and philosophy. Von Nolcken’s biography begins and ends with Rickert’s plan for this work, penciled at the very end of her life. Rickert’s intellectual vibrancy and devotion to hard work ring clear. In her own words: “In this life, just as I am, physically & mentally, I have certain powers & certain opportunities not quite like those of anyone else. So with each of us. It is our business to be used to the utmost. And why, I wonder? Because stagnation means atrophy—going backward—& that is the one crime. The perpetual urge in us toward growth & grasp & power & understanding—that is God.”

Teller of Tales

Christina von Nolcken, associate professor emerita of English, is a scholar of Old and Middle English literature, Anglo-Scandinavian relations near the end of the Anglo-Saxon period, and efforts by John Wycliffe’s followers to extend religious education to the public. As her former students acknowledge in a volume compiled in her honor in 2021, von Nolcken’s research contributed to a larger reassessment of medieval literature that grappled with how texts were interpreted and reworked over time by scribes and other intermediaries. Her research has focused particularly on how the Wycliffe Bible and The Canterbury Tales, as well as devotional texts including the Ancrene Riwle (a rule book for anchoresses, or cloistered nuns), have been rewrought over time. A 2003 winner of the Quantrell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching, von Nolcken always especially enjoyed teaching The Canterbury Tales.—C. C.

Try your hand at code breaking.

CTBIE KHECR RNWSP CIERI AGAKH*

Found sewn into the clothes of Lothar Witzke, alias Pablo Waberski, when he was arrested while crossing from Mexico to Arizona, the piece of paper that came to be called the Waberski cipher was a significant piece of German military intelligence. It was decrypted by MI-8, the Code and Cipher Section of the US Army’s Military Intelligence Division, to which Manly and Rickert were assigned during World War I. The cipher proved that Waberski, who was suspected of orchestrating multiple attacks on American cities, was a secret agent operating with a significant level of discretion.

In 1927 Manly described the process of decrypting the Waberski cipher. He does not name himself or Rickert in the description but simply refers to “the two experts.”

The experts were able to determine, based on letter frequency, that the message was written in German and that it was a transposition cipher, in which existing letters are rearranged. Known patterns in German spelling, like the fact that the letter c is always followed by h or k, helped them identify patterns in the cipher.

Manly and Rickert thought it likely the cipher was a columnar transposition cipher, where groups of letters are arranged into columns and rows, like a spreadsheet, and a key determines the order in which to read the columns. Organizing the message into these blocks, they began to spot some likely words. The one that jumped out first was composed of two groups of four: KMEX and IKOP could be placed one after the other to form Mexiko (the German spelling of the country’s name).

They used trial and error to determine what order of these three- and four-letter blocks would produce legible text, finding that the Waberski cipher had been through a double transposition process: Not only were the columns out of order, but the rows were, too. “Strictly Secret exclamation point”—the message finally emerged, punctuation written out—“The bearer of this is a subject of the Empire who travels as a Russian under the name of Pablo Waberski period He is a German secret agent period,” it began.—C. C.

*The key to this cipher is 45213. Find the answer below.

Solution: Cracking the Waberski Cipher