Assoc. Prof. Emerita Christina von Nolcken liked taking students on “little jaunts,” trips to the Hanna Holborn Gray Special Collections Research Center.
There she would show them the famous eight-volume work The Text of the Canterbury Tales, Studied on the Basis of All Known Manuscripts, by scholars and University of Chicago professors John Manly and Edith Rickert, PhD'1899.
In all her years teaching a course on Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, 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.
“This is a really interesting woman,” said von Nolcken, a scholar of Old and Middle English literature.
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.
The book reveals an accomplished scholar and writer who was also partly responsible for one of the most important acts 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.
Cracking the code
Rickert was born in 1871 and grew up first in the small Ohio town of Canal Dover and later in Chicago.
The first in her family to go to college, Rickert graduated from Vassar in 1891 as valedictorian. She then returned to Chicago to teach high school and pursue a Ph.D. in Middle English at UChicago. 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.
The summer of 1899 took her to Chicago to defend her Ph.D. 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.” But she nevertheless decided to return to England and establish herself as a writer—publishing five well-received novels, several works of scholarship and many short stories.
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, D.C. to become a code breaker.
Rickert 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.
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.
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 U.S.–Mexico border. Known patterns in German spelling, like the fact that the letter c is always followed by h or k, helped them identify patterns. 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,” said von Nolcken.
Tellers of Tales
After the war, Rickert 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.
After purchasing photostats of all the manuscripts, they and their assistants collated them in what became known as the “Chaucer Laboratory” at UChicago. Both Rickert and Manly now taught at the University, where Rickert—like von Nolcken—became a full professor focusing on medieval English literature.
“I had her job, in a sense,” von Nolcken said.
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.”
Von Nolcken’s biography is bookended by excerpts from Rickert’s notes towards an unfinished autobiography, My Book, penciled at the very end of her life.
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.”
—This article was originally published in the University of Chicago Magazine.
