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Codebreakers crack secrets of the lost letters of Mary, Queen of Scots

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Secret, coded letters penned by Mary, Queen of Scots, while she was imprisoned in England by her cousin Queen Elizabeth I, have been uncovered by a multidisciplinary team of international codebreakers.
Secret, coded letters penned by Mary, Queen of Scots, while she was imprisoned in England by her cousin Queen Elizabeth I, have been uncovered by a multidisciplinary team of international codebreakers.

The contents of the letters were believed for centuries to have been lost. That was until George Lasry, a computer scientist and cryptographer, Norbert Biermann, a pianist and music professor, and Satoshi Tomokiyo, who is a physicist and patents expert, stumbled upon them while searching the national library of France’s—Bibliothèque nationale de France’s (BnF)—online archives for enciphered documents.
The trio only discovered Mary was the author after solving her sophisticated cipher system. Their decipherment work of 57 letters, which is presented in the journal Cryptologia, reveals approximately 50 new scripts previously unknown to historians.
These date from 1578 to 1584, a few years before her beheading on this very day 436 years ago—February 8, 1587.
Mary’s correspondences expose fascinating insights into her captivity. Most are addressed to Michel de Castelnau de Mauvissière, the French ambassador to England. He was a supporter of Catholic Mary, who was under the Earl of Shrewsbury’s custody when she wrote them.

Interview with George Lasry. Credit: Taylor & Francis
„Upon deciphering the letters, I was very, very puzzled and it kind of felt surreal,“ says lead author Lasry, who is also part of the multi-disciplinary DECRYPT Project involving several universities in Europe, with the goal of mapping, digitizing, transcribing, and deciphering historical ciphers.
„We have broken secret codes from kings and queens previously, and they’re very interesting, but with Mary Queen of Scots it was remarkable as we had so many unpublished letters deciphered and because she is so famous. This is a truly exciting discovery.“
He added, „Together, the letters 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.

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