Lost Letters by Mary, Queen of Scots

 

Euan Ward, "Lost Letters by Mary, Queen of Scots, Uncovered by Amateur Code Breakers,"  New York Times, Feb. 8, 2023.  https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/08/world/europe/mary-queen-of-scots-letters.html

Deep in the archives of France’s national library, an assortment of coded letters listed as Italian texts lay untouched for more than 400 years. But when three code breakers — a German pianist, an Israeli computer scientist and a Japanese physicist — stumbled upon them, they discovered something remarkable.

They were, they found, not Italian texts at all.

Instead, they were part of the secret prison correspondence of Mary, Queen of Scots, whose tragic life and tangled role in the lethal dynastic and religious politics of 16th-century Europe have long fascinated writers and historians. One leading biographer of Mary described the discovery as the most significant in the study of her life for more than a century.

“We found treasure lying in plain sight,” said George Lasry, the Israeli computer scientist who led the yearlong project, which was released to the public on Wednesday, the 436th anniversary of Mary’s death.

COMMENT
A classic tale of finding hidden treasure, with the twist that a library cataloging error made the letters invisible.