Not Just the Tudors
Mary Queen of Scots’ Lost Letters Decoded
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Episode notes
The most important discovery related to Mary Queen of Scots for 100 years was recently made - by a team of amateur cryptologists. A large batch of letters were written in cipher code during Mary's captivity and, when leaked through a mole, led to her being condemned for treason and ultimately executed at the order of her cousin Queen Elizabeth I.
More than 400 years later, Professor Suzannah Lipscomb talks with George Lasry - a computer scientist by day - about how he and his colleagues decoded over 50 letters, and proved that Mary wrote them during her 19 years of imprisonment. What insights do they give us into the personal and political thoughts of one of Europe’s most famous and tragic monarchs?
The full paper on the ciphered letters can be found in the journal Cryptologia, here.
The project was sponsored by DECRYPT Project - a European inter-university project to collect, transcribe, and decipher encoded documents found in archives, here.
This episode was edited by Stuart Beckwith and produced by Rob Weinberg.
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