Mary Queen of Scots’ Lost Letters Decoded

2023-02-20

The most important discovery related to Mary Queen of Scots for 100 years was recently made - by a team of amateur cryptologists. In this episode of Not Just the Tudors, Professor Suzannah Lipscomb talks with Dr. George Lasry - a computer scientist by day - about how he and his colleagues found by chance more than 50 letters in code in the Bibliothèque nationale de France, deciphered them, and proved that Mary wrote them during six of her 19 years of imprisonment. What insights do they give us into the personal and po...

The most important discovery related to Mary Queen of Scots for 100 years was recently made - by a team of amateur cryptologists.

In this episode of Not Just the Tudors, Professor Suzannah Lipscomb talks with Dr. George Lasry - a computer scientist by day - about how he and his colleagues found by chance more than 50 letters in code in the Bibliothèque nationale de France, deciphered them, and proved that Mary wrote them during six of 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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