Nadine Akkerman is Professor of Early Modern Literature & Culture at Leiden University and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, London. From September 2022 to September 2023, she was Visiting Senior Fellow at Jesus College, University of Oxford. She has published extensively on women’s history, diplomacy and masques, and curated several exhibitions. 

Professor Akkerman is the editor of The Correspondence of Elizabeth Stuart  (three volumes, OUP); and her compelling study of early modern women spies, Invisible Agents: Women and Espionage in Seventeenth-Century Britain was published by OUP in 2018, a ground-breaking contribution to the history of espionage detailing a series of case studies in which women – from playwright to postmistress, from lady-in-waiting to laundry woman – acted as spies, sourcing and passing on confidential information on account of political and religious convictions or to obtain money or power. 

Professor Akkerman and Dr Pete Langman’s new study, Spycraft: Tricks and Tools of the Dangerous Trade from Elizabeth I to the Restoration, is a fascinating history of early modern espionage techniques from the 16th century onwards, published by Yale University Press in 2024.

‘A fascinating deep dive into early modern espionage techniques, a world of forgery, cipher wheels, secret letters written with invisible inks, and poison drawn from vipers and toads. Akkerman and Langman have produced nothing less than the origin story of James Bond’s Q-Branch.’ – Charles Cumming, bestselling author of the BOX 88 series.