Religious History of Britain seminar at the IHR on 11th February (pasted): Lost Letters of Mary Stuart

 The next seminar will be taking place next week online only on Tuesday 11 February at 5:30pm (GMT). Please note the different time compared to the in-person seminars this term. The seminar will be a roundtable session entitled 'The Lost Letters of Mary Stuart', which will given by George Lasry, Norbert Biermann, Satoshi Tomokiyo and Alex Courtney who are working on this particular research topic, with a copy of their abstract below:

'Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots (1542–1587), has left an extensive corpus of letters held in various archive collections. There is evidence, however, that other letters from Mary Stuart are missing from those collections, such as letters referenced in other sources but not found elsewhere. In Under the Molehill – an Elizabethan Spy Story, John Bossy writes that a secret correspondence with her associates and allies, prior to its compromise in mid-1583, was “kept so secure that none of it has survived, and we don’t know what was in it.” We have found over 55 letters fully in cipher in the Bibliotheque nationale de France, which, after we broke the code and deciphered the letters, unexpectedly turned out to be letters from Mary Stuart, addressed mostly to Michel de Castelnau Mauvissiere, the French ambassador to England. Written between 1578 and 1584, those newly deciphered letters are most likely part of the aforementioned secret correspondence considered to have been lost, and they constitute a voluminous body of new primary material on Mary Stuart – about 50,000 words in total, shedding new light on some of her years of captivity in England'.