Invisible Agents: Women and Espionage in Seventeenth-Century Britain by Nadine Akkerman (review)

The "missing" of history are not really "missing" at all of course; they merely await exposure and a chance to enter into the new norms of historical discourse. Quite often they are kept missing by either prevalent historical structures, or by the loss of material, and it is usually the finely detailed exposure of historical evidence, as well as good historians who begin to ask the right questions, that truly dictate new interpretations and reveal them. So, Nadine Akkerman's book is both a welcome addition not only to the literature of espionage, but also to the general history of the early-modern period.

It is certainly a volume steeped in solid new research for the period of the 1640 s to the 1660 s and it seeks to illuminate the fact that despite the many gender restrictions laid upon them by a patriarchal early-modern society, women could, and did, successfully engage in the secret world of espionage. Some were given opportunities to engage in espionage, others created their own opportunities, yet others fell into espionage by accident.

Yet espionage history is always complex. Far too often it is over burdened with the idea of secrecy revealed. Popular historical culture, indeed, tends to latch rather over-enthusiastically onto this revelatory idea when it deals with spies. Yet the material of this covert realm also deals with numerous "might-have-been" episodes, some reported by spies giving false or exaggerated information, and as such have themselves been regularly dismissed by some historians as merely disingenuous or ultimately harmless dead-ends, and thus historically unimportant. For early modern contemporaries, however, as Akkerman shows, espionage activities really were seen as giving access to secret knowledge, otherwise unobtainable, and to information that could be used to protect the early modern state, or at least those individuals in it who really counted. And while such matters may have been secret (even if sometimes unnecessarily) they were also linked to the more emergent public exchange mechanisms in information within contemporary economic and public life.

So, how typical are the stories in this work of the real "shee-spies" of the era as opposed to their popular TV and movie counterparts? And what can they actually tell us about the more significant historical matters of the day, other than relating often remarkable, and it might be argued, much needed realistic narratives? Still more significantly perhaps how does such an early-modern world connect with our modern interpretations of such clandestine matters, or are we merely always fated to see such matters continually dressed up in the clothes and languages of our own contemporary intelligence agencies? Who were the "shee-spies" in this era?

That there were women involved in espionage in this period is now not to be doubted: their experiences are ably written up in this volume. Indeed, early-modern British society's gendered norms and structures often gave them some advantages over the men who worked in the same field. And, conversely the punishments for those women who were caught could frequently be much less harsh than those inflicted on men doing the same job, even though they breached societal norms.

This book covers the female British experience in espionage from the period of the Civil War to that of the first part of the reign of Charles II. One could regret, of course, that the author doesn't push her history into the later half of the seventeenth-century where other female agents certainly existed. Yet, the shortened period provided the opportunity for case studies. After a wide-ranging and sensitive introduction to this field, Akkerman turns to examining the credibility of "she-intelligencers" by moving into seven detailed biographically based chapters on the histories of some of the individual women who became involved in the world of spying: Susan Hyde; Elizabeth Murray; Elizabeth Cary, Lady Mordaunt; Anne, Lady Halkett and, last of all ends with the career...