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k xi k FoReWoRD Ted Widmer It is not the easiest thing in the world to surprise an institution that knows itself as well as the John Carter Brown Library. Each book is beautifully catalogued by devoted librarians. Detailed files are kept on the provenance of each item in the collection. Scholars then pore over the Library’s treasures, adding to the store of bibliographic information. Knowledge is accumulated slowly and painstakingly, by well-trained professionals with deep experience in the field. The basic formula has been in place for over a century, when the holdings of a private collection were transferred to a building on the Brown campus, for the benefit of future research. Yet all of these assumptions were thrown aside in the spring of 2012, when a team of undergraduates unveiled a breathtaking series of revelations about a document in the library that no previous scholar had been able to decipher. For generations, the JCB staff had referred to this document as “The Mystery Book.” That was a fitting description for an item that was booklike in many ways, a 234-page quarto, but defied easy categorization. The Mystery Book was several books in one—a printed book (albeit with the title page missing), and also a manuscript, written in a convoluted hand, around the printed words of the book. But there was a catch—the manuscript was in a complex code that had never been cracked. The mystery deepened, with the strong supposition that the hand in question belonged to Roger Williams. That came from an unsigned note attached to the book and dated November 11, 1817. It read, in part, “The margin is filled with Short Hand Characters, Dates, Names of places &c. &c. by Roger Williams or it appears to be his hand Writing. . . . brot me from Widow Tweedy by Nicholas Brown Jr.” xii k Foreword These were tantalizing clues. They also threw the question into a special sphere of local importance, touching upon the identity of both Brown University (named after a gift from the same Nicholas Brown Jr.) and Rhode Island (founded and forever stamped by Roger Williams). Arguably, no other state has as profound an identification with a single founding figure—Pennsylvania comes closest, but in that case the colony was founded by a gentleman living in England, whose influence came from his proximity to the king. In Rhode Island, the story is personal, and stems from the heroism of a founding figure who displayed both physical and intellectual courage in his flight from persecution, and his creation of a refuge for other free-thinkers. For all of these reasons, the question of what Roger Williams (if it was he) meant to say (if his code could be broken) over the pages of this book (if we knew what it was) was meaningful. But for centuries, no one had been able to crack the code. Even Nicholas Brown Jr. had no idea what the book-manuscript said. It was written over a century before he acquired it, and for all he knew, it might have been written in Aramaic. As director of the library, I had taken a personal interest in the book, and spoke about its mysteries to local audiences. But I had no plan for solving the mystery. That began to change in the fall of 2010, when a hard-headed diplomat, Bill Twaddell, heard one of my lectures. With a tenacity worthy of a seasoned ambassador, Bill began to probe the question deeply. At his urging, the library began to convene gatherings of scholars with related expertise—mathematicians who might help us with the code, and English and history professors with background in the seventeenth century. These were fascinating conversations. But the mystery remained a mystery. That began to change, however, when a team of Brown University undergraduates caught the scent. One of them, Lucas Mason-Brown, a coauthor of this book, began to reveal to us, over the winter of 2011– 2012, that they were cracking the code. In the spring he presented the team’s findings in a dramatic lecture that had some of the qualities of a fast-breaking news conference. Indeed, the local press covered it prominently the next day. Our state founder was saying something new to us, for the first time since the seventeenth century. Roger Williams speaks! Stop the presses! As director of the library, I was thrilled by this adventure. It represented everything I believe in—that the best history is collaborative...

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