Archival detective, author, biographer, cryptographer, editor, spymistress. Prof in early modern lit & culture
@UniLeiden
; Represented by
@JohnsonAlcock
Thrilled to see the cover of my next book revealed today! The biography of 'Elizabeth Stuart, Queen of Hearts' is available to pre-order
A true bargain at £20, c. 600 pages of the most exciting bits of the 17th century. Out Oct 2021
Academia is broken. I signed my 1st, full-time, permanent contract, after 15 years at
@LeidenHum
. Yesterday. I’m 44. This contract was the one that made me professor.
Thrilling discovery: I may have found the FINGERPRINTS of Margaret Cavendish (1623-73), Duchess of Newcastle in the
@ubleiden
! They are in a presentation copy of her works in the
@UniLeiden
Library in the same colour ink as her own handwritten corrections
Happy to see the cover of my book revealed today! The first study of early modern women spies, “Invisible Agents: Women and Espionage in Seventeenth-Century Britain”, is available to preorder and at £20 for a hardback a true bargain. Out early July
On the day of her execution, a computer scientist, a musician, and a patent lawyer reveal that they stumbled on 57 fully ciphered letters online (!) & decoded them, using frequency analysis and algorithms. They turned out to be by Mary, Queen of Scots.
Thrilled to discover that the book I worked on for years is no longer a fiction. The very first study to analyse the role of early modern women spies,
"Invisible Agents: Women and Espionage in Seventeenth-Century Britain"
is now available to pre-order!
On 6 April students, administrators & staff of all Dutch universities will call on the new government to invest 1.1 billion euros p.a. in teaching & research. I love this photo of serious
@UniLeiden
profs wearing snorkel gear because they can ‘barely keep their heads above water’
People say ‘never meet your heroes’, but when I interviewed the force-of-nature that is historian Natalie Zemon Davis for the Dutch tv programme
#GroteVragen
, she could not have been more inspirational! Tune in on October 8th, NPO 2, at 22.15.
Psst – can you keep a secret? We can't - we've got a new book on the way, and here’s proof!
@YaleBooks
Pre-order now: £20 guarantees you an exciting summer of
#spycraft
...
Tomorrow I pick up the keys of my new home for the Academic Year 2022-2023, where I will find myself in the esteemed company of
@SueDora26898513
@PKewes
et al. I am honoured to have been elected as the Visiting Senior Research Fellow of
@JesusOxford
!
Geweldige hoeveelheid tegels aangetroffen in de voormalige sacristie van de Oude Kerk aan het Oudekerksplein, achter een deur in een bedstedewand, een voor mij onbekend trappenhuisje naar de kelder.
Just to let you know I won’t be answering e-mails any time soon, as this long-awaited gem by
@johnalan57
hit my desk this morning! It’s a must-read for anyone interested in early modern intelligence studies
#espionage
Important announcement RT: in honour of the late Prof. Lisa Jardine, there is a fellowship available for an early career female scholar! If you are UK based, work on Anglo-Dutch exchange, and would love to spend time in A'dam this summer, then please apply
This might be a good time to announce that next academic year I'll be a Visiting Fellow at All Souls College, University of Oxford, writing the biography of
#ElizabethStuart
,
#QueenofBohemia
!
If you do want to familiarise yourself with the life and family of Elizabeth of Bohemia, the academic expert is
@misswalsingham
. Her forthcoming biography, researched at All Souls, will be a treat.
Claxon! Bubbling with excitement to announce several (!) fully-funded 4-year PhD positions in my ERC Consolidator project
#FEATHERS
at
@LeidenHum
! ... Here it goes ...
Opening up Macculloch's Thomas Cromwell: A Life. Acknowledgements: 'It was a very kind thought of the late Jill, Duchess of Hamilton, to give me a portrait of Cromwell to preside over my writing in my study'. To all duchesses out there: I'm writing Elizabeth Stuart: A Life. DM me
Menus folded as 17th-c locked letters for the dinner preceding my Visiting Fellow talk on the Queen of Bohemia at All Souls College, Oxford
#Winterqueenery
Lovely, just lovely - my university e-mail moves all e-mails with the word 'Spycraft' into 'quarantine', a spam-folder that one can only access by contacting a helpdesk. My new
@YaleBooks
book is called .... Spycraft!
About to board my flight to Paris. My journey to meet trailblazing historian Natalie Zemon Davis has begun! So
#twitterstorians
... if you were to interview her, what would you ask her about archives, women’s history, and/or the writing of women’s lives?
#FictionintheArchives
Humbled by these endorsements from Natalie Zemon Davies &
@katemosse
💗 The back cover of the biography 'Elizabeth Stuart, Queen of Hearts'
@OUPHistory
looks as stunning as the front!
This endorsement lifts me up & makes it all worthwhile: '“In Queen of Hearts, Nadine Akkerman combines matchless archival expertise with a story-teller’s instinct to give new life to one of the seventeenth century’s most misunderstood women. A gripping tale.”– Natalie Zemon Davis
Proud that the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts & Sciences
@_knaw
appointed me to their Humanities Council (Dutch: ‘lid Raad van Geesteswetenschappen’). As
@helmers_h
said, it’s an honour as well as a huge responsibility-particularly in today’s climate.
@UniLeiden
@LeidenHum
I took a copy of Fiction in the Archives to Nantes with me - not just any copy, but the one Natalie signed for her close friend, my late mentor, the much-missed Professor Lisa Jardine. She signed it again, now for me. I’ll cherish this copy forever
Staring at a clipping of yesterday’s Sunday Telegraph: a five-star review of my book Invisible Agents: Women and Espionage in Seventeenth-Century Britain - a ‘brilliant new book’, according to Sir Noel Malcolm!
Happy
#HistoryWritersDay22
! Volume III in the making and current work in progress closely guarded secret🕵️ 😉 but these were the fruits of 2011-2021, a decade of hard work and discoveries.
Beaming at a clipping of The Daily Telegraph: a five-star review of my book
#ElizabethStuart
, Queen of Hearts - a 'masterful, transformative biography', according to Sir Noel Malcolm! ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
The story of my friend and conservatrix extraordinaire, Jana Dambrogio
@mitlibraries
, who coined the term
@letterlocking
& turned my scholarly life upside down:
My biographer or avenger, Nadine, says that my biography will be out in the autumn with
@OUPHistory
I,
#ElizabethStuart
, am watching her carefully, and hope that she hasn't deciphered those letters I wrote in code. But I've read her
#InvisibleAgents
and fear for the worst ...
This is utterly fantastic: in 1666 Cornelis Hanecop wrote a letter of application to Johan de Witt, presumably hoping for a secretarial job. He encloses a sheet on which he demonstrates his many different styles of handwriting
#ElizabethStuart
, sister of the late Charles I, detested Oliver Cromwell, writing to her friend Sir Edward Nicholas in 1655 that ‘Cromwell is the beast in the Revelations that all kings and nations doe worship: I wish him the like end and speedilie, and you a hapie new yeare’.
In 2014, I wrote a chapter entitled ‘The Goddess of the Household: The Masquing Politics of Lucy Harington-Russell, Countess of Bedford’. The style guide tells me that I should abbreviate that in footnotes to Akkerman, 'The Goddess'. I have no objection.
Beautiful, relatively unknown portrait of Elizabeth Stuart. Her collar emphasizes her British royal status, w/ coat of arms, lions, and unicorns in the lace. We can just see the glimpse of the black armband that she is wearing, indicating she is in mourning for her brother Henry.
@Lit_Review
Speaking of the
@Lit_Review
cover (and this month's avatar), it features a smorgasbord of the
#Spycraft
techniques we discuss in our book - triangle locks, frog purses, cipher wheels, Cardan grilles, invisible inks, poisons etc. We couldn't love it any more if we tried! 😍
‘This is an important work for the emergent field of gendered court politics’ – Nothing but praise by Dr Elizabeth Reid for The Politics of Female Households! See her review in Parergon 35.1 (2018): pp. 141-2.
#LadiesinWaiting
#PowerWomen
For the final chapter, in order to submit my book this month, I only need to describe a bit of civil war, 1 execution, 1 marriage, 1 assault, 2 conversions, 1 murder, the Restoration, & my subject’s death. Totally doable, right? What have I gotten myself into?
#QueenofBohemia
Op vrijdag 3 mei, klokke 16.15 uur, zal ik mijn hoogleraarsambt aanvaarden met het uitspreken van mijn oratie getiteld: 'Het verhaal van de staartloze kat: over auteurschap in de vroegmoderne tijd'. Volg de livestream:
@UniLeiden
@LeidenHum
@LUCAS_Leiden
Found a present in the post this morning: TY
@OUPHistory
- I love these promotional business cards! I can slip them undetected into people’s pockets and handbags, as well as give them out.
#InvisibleAgents
#Spymistress
Getting ready for the official book launch of
@Querido_Facto
De Hartenkoningin, the Dutch translation of
#ElizabethStuart
Queen of 💕 Elizabeth would have approved of the date, Oct 3rd, the date that Leiden celebrates the Spanish abandoning their siege of the city in 1574
Gearing up for a lot of exciting news, publications, research, &, most of all, determined to stay positive ... so, I finally thought it was time for a website:
For those of us
#twitterstorians
who have worked so hard that not a minute was spent on Twitter last week .... THIS happened👇 ... I’m about to open my 3rd bottle of champagne
The article showcases animations of the virtual unfolding alongside images of the results, and downloadable foldable models so you can lock at home. All our resources are screen-reader friendly.
Margaret Cavendish (1623-73) has the best stage directions. Act II, Scene I: 'Enter Monsieur Take-Pleasure, and his Man Dick'.
#ConventofPleasure
#amreading
I'm sending off the 30k-word Index of 'Elizabeth Stuart, Queen of Hearts', to the publisher ... The siege is finally lifted, indeed Leiden, also in my house.
For
#WomensHistoryMonth
: I proudly present the fearless, king-defying, boar-spearing ancestor of Elizabeth II,
#ElizabethStuart
, Queen of 💕, Bohemia & almost of England!
Of course, as a woman I realise I should show some humility but I'm hugely proud that I was the first to find Royalist spy Susan Hyde (1607-56) in the vaults of the
@bodleianlibs
: I rescued her from oblivion & now she is noticed by
@katemosse
's campaign
Honoured and humbled in equal measure to be giving the 2023 Lisa Jardine Memorial Lecture. More than a mentor, Lisa profoundly influenced my career, practice, and taste in shoes. And bags.
@JesusCollegeCam
@IntellForum
9 Feb
Exciting news for those who stayed away from social media over the holidays: 2024 will see a new book out on early modern spies! Pre-order now, as not to miss their tricks & the GLOW-in-the-DARK cover
#Walsingham
#MaryQofScots
#ElizabethI
#InvisibleAgents
Honoured to find my name on the
#VIVA400
, a list of women's magazine
@VIVA_nl
(nothing to do w/ PhD defences) of the 400 most inspiring women in the Netherlands, in the category 'Knappe Knoppen', as the only humanities scholar! If you think the humanities matter too, vote for me
Alumna Nadine Akkerman nominated for the
#viva400
list, which highlights achievements of women in science. If you like spies, rewriting (male) history, secrets and the scholar who reveals them, vote for
@misswalsingham
at
Get your history of 16th- & 17th-century forgers, poisoners, rival queens, spy chiefs, inventors, magi, lowborn spies, crafty secretaries, canny codebreakers, unicorns, suspicious physicians, she-intelligencers, master scriveners, torturers & toad-pesterers !
In book stores now
I am thrilled to have purchased this gem of a book: Spycraft: Tricks and Tools of the Dangerous Trade from Elizabeth I to the Restoration!
#spycraft
#nadineakkerman
#petelangman
Cover reveal for the weekend crowd! Thrilled with this gif
@YaleBooks
made for our book
#Spycraft
, an exploration of the methods
#spies
actually used in the 16th - & 17th-c, including ciphers, invisible inks, disguises, poisonous toads & daggers.
#ElizabethI
#MaryQofScots
Grand location for the keynote
@elegantfowl
and I gave at an international cryptography conference: Heidelberg Castle! We hope it was the first of many talks on our new book,
#Spycraft
!
The house of philosopher René Descartes has been sold into private hands again, but here’s a unique chance to have a peek inside. He lived at 21 the Rapenburg; his correspondent Elisabeth, Princess Palatine at nos. 4-10 (the now demolished Prinsenhof)
@LeidenHum
Still thrilled that
#Spycraft
: Tricks & Tools of the Dangerous Trade from Elizabeth I to the Restoration inspired the cover of
@Lit_Review
so shamelessly posting again
Out now! Literary Review's June issue, featuring
Peter Davidson on Elizabeth I's Q Branch
@GylesB1
on a near-disastrous indiscretion
@william_whyte
on dons behaving badly
@OborneTweets
on literary cricketers
@rosalyster
on Richard Flanagan
And much else:
Since I'll be leading the
@ERC_Research
Consolidator grant
#FEATHERS
soon, my teaching at
@UniLeiden
will be replaced. For those English lit early modernists out there looking for an amazing job, apply for this 3-year lectureship at
@LeidenHum
After having spent a month in a beach house writing & having enjoyed a last Florida sunset, I flew back to A’dam w/ a nearly finished book manuscript of the biography of
#ElizabethStuart
in my suitcase. Back to my ‘normal’ life today: on my way to the
@DeJongeAkademie