![]() ![]() Since, as Akkerman warns, "the successful spy is the one who leaves no trace", the relative successes of the various "she-intelligencers" who wrote reports in invisible ink and practised origami to "letter-lock" their dispatches to decoy addresses might, frustratingly, be gauged in terms of their subsequent archival invisibility. In Nadine Akkerman's Invisible Agents, an extensive cast of female aristocrats, courtiers, postmistresses, playwrights, nurses and laundresses were held to be above suspicion-and thus free to operate as invisible agents-simply because they were women. ![]() When one of Falstaff's henchmen plans a heist in Henry IV Part 1, he is reassured by allusion to the popular contemporary belief that, since "we have the receipt of fern-seed, we walk invisible". Women and espionage in seventeenth-century BritainĢ88pp. ![]()
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