This attitude allowed women to navigate the spheres of the domestic and the political without arousing undue attention. Women were suited to this liminal work as contemporary social attitudes broadly determined them to be guileless. Akkerman redresses this critical neglect, offering a view of both Parliamentarian and Royalist female agents at a time of heightened political tension.Īkkerman writes that “a spy occupies liminal space” (10).

Akkerman attributes the previous lack of critical attention to the social belief that women were above suspicion: “people simply refused to believe that women could possibly be involved in such plots – and subsequent historiography has tended to follow suit” (4).

Invisible Agents is a book that successfully establishes its own value and makes the reader question why such work has not previously been undertaken. This need is met by Akkerman’s opening claim that “female spying activities were at the very heart of British international relations in the mid-seventeenth century” (3). The sheer volume of archival information present in this book creates the need for an overarching orientating principle to guide the reader. Akkerman evokes this comparison by referring to herself as “a modern John Thurloe, Oliver Cromwell’s most memorable spymaster” (3). In her introduction, Akkerman discusses the origins of her study, and openly invites comparison between the historical sleuthing involved in uncovering the details of these female agents’ lives and their real-life espionage work.

Akkerman invites the reader to undertake a process of discovery as she unveils the historical data through a series of case-studies. From the detective-like quality of Akkerman’s methodological processes, to the inclusion of a dedication written in code, this text immediately informs the reader that it is to be approached inquisitively. In uncovering these histories, Akkerman establishes the impact of women’s roles in the socio-political history of the early modern period. Akkerman explains this as the process of recovering female voices from records dominated by male histories, carefully piecing together the stories of women from the range of available-albeit previously neglected-evidence. She achieves this through her methodological process of “Reading Against the Archival Grain” (23). In Invisible Agents Akkerman has produced the first dedicated study of seventeenth-century intelligencers.

Review of Invisible Agents: Women and Espionage in Seventeenth-Century Britain

Invisible Agents by Nadine Akkerman