Nadine Akkerman & Pete Langman - Spycraft - Revealing the Early Modern Q. (Fri 25th July 1.30pm)
Early modern Europe was a hotbed of espionage: spies, spy-catchers, and conspirators pitted their wits against each other in deadly games of hide and seek―only those who mastered the latest techniques would survive. In their acclaimed book Spycraft, Nadine Akkerman and Pete Langman explore the tricks and tools used by spies and counter-spies in the 16th and 17th centuries. By exploring the physical realities facing the spy as he (or she) sought to take control of the battle for information by counterfeiting letters, passports and other documents, protecting their own secrets with ciphers, codes, and invisible inks while trying to unveil those of their enemies, and how, if all else failed, they sought to assassinate their enemies, they shed new light on old stories such as The Babington Plot and the Gunpowder Plot.
Prof Nadine Akkerman is professor of early modern literature and culture at Leiden University and author of the prize-winning Invisible Agents: Women and Espionage in 17th-century Britain and the definitive biography of Elizabeth Stuart, Queen of Hearts. She has played a starring role in projects such as Signed, Sealed and Undelivered, which developed an algorithm that can unwrap and read letters without damaging them, and The Memory of Scent, which recreates perfumes from original 17th -century recipes.
Dr Pete Langman is a writer, editor and academic, OED bibliographer, author of Killing Beauties, a novel featuring female spies in the Interregnum, The Country House Cricketer, and Slender Threads: a young person’s guide to Parkinson’s disease, and manuscript editor for Early Modern Low Countries Journal. His PhD (2007) was on Francis Bacon (the early modern one).
Book signing available
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Early modern Europe was a hotbed of espionage: spies, spy-catchers, and conspirators pitted their wits against each other in deadly games of hide and seek―only those who mastered the latest techniques would survive. In their acclaimed book Spycraft, Nadine Akkerman and Pete Langman explore the tricks and tools used by spies and counter-spies in the 16th and 17th centuries. By exploring the physical realities facing the spy as he (or she) sought to take control of the battle for information by counterfeiting letters, passports and other documents, protecting their own secrets with ciphers, codes, and invisible inks while trying to unveil those of their enemies, and how, if all else failed, they sought to assassinate their enemies, they shed new light on old stories such as The Babington Plot and the Gunpowder Plot.
Prof Nadine Akkerman is professor of early modern literature and culture at Leiden University and author of the prize-winning Invisible Agents: Women and Espionage in 17th-century Britain and the definitive biography of Elizabeth Stuart, Queen of Hearts. She has played a starring role in projects such as Signed, Sealed and Undelivered, which developed an algorithm that can unwrap and read letters without damaging them, and The Memory of Scent, which recreates perfumes from original 17th -century recipes.
Dr Pete Langman is a writer, editor and academic, OED bibliographer, author of Killing Beauties, a novel featuring female spies in the Interregnum, The Country House Cricketer, and Slender Threads: a young person’s guide to Parkinson’s disease, and manuscript editor for Early Modern Low Countries Journal. His PhD (2007) was on Francis Bacon (the early modern one).
Book signing available
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