PERHAPS A GIFT VOUCHER FOR MUM?: MOTHER'S DAY
Nadine Akkerman is a Reader in Early Modern English Literature at Leiden University. She has published extensively on women's history, diplomacy, and masques, and curated several exhibitions. In the academic year 2015/16 she was Fellow at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences (NIAS-KNAW). She is the editor of The Correspondence of Elizabeth Stuart, Queen of Bohemia (OUP, 3 volumes, of which the first appeared in 2011), for which her prize-winning PhD (2008) serves at the groundwork. She is currently writing a biography of Elizabeth Stuart (forthcoming from OUP). In 2017, the World Cultural Council recognised the transformative effect of her work in the form of a Special Recognition Award.
A dazzling study of a truly neglected subject, which ably demonstrates the gendered dimension of early modern spy-craft, and the unique ways in which women were able to operate. It is written by one of the foremost early modern textual-historical scholars of her generation and marshals an almost unmatched expertise in working with an impressive range of European and international archives of the period. The book delivers a series of fascinating case studies - including Charles I's prison correspondence, Secretary Thurloe, as well as female practitioners Susan Hyde, Elizabeth Murray, Elizabeth Carey, Anne Halkett, and Aphra Behn - all of which rest on a remarkable and overwhelming weight of archival research. This is an important book that will be widely read and cited, and which will have significant impact on many fields not least those of early modern gender and women's writing, but also political and diplomatic history. * Professor James Daybell, University of Plymouth * A triumph of scholarly rigour, original thinking and crisp prose. It is, in every sense, a cracking book. * Jessie Childs, The Daily Telegraph * Pioneering ... a most valuable book, highlighting women's contribution to the conspiratorial world of mid-17th-century Britain, while also offering a thought provoking exercise in gender and historical methods. * Ann Hughes, BBC History Magazine * Invisible Agents is a work of deep scholarship that suggests Akkerman would have made an excellent spy catcher. * Leanda de Lisle, The Times * A dense, hugely researched and admirably learned history of women spies during the Civil War. * Dominic Sandbrook, The Sunday Times *
