Cryptologists unknowingly stumbled upon a trove of long-lost letters that Mary, Queen of Scots wrote in captivity. Their decryption has been hailed as the most important discovery about her in 100 years.
The team first assumed the letters were written in Italian because of how they archives were labeled, but got no meaningful results. They tried again with French and got this tentative decryption.The team first assumed the letters were written in Italian because of how they archives were labeled, but got no meaningful results. They tried again with French and got this tentative decryption.and linguistic as well as contextual analysis.
"After the code was cracked, we needed to decipher all the letters one by one, and edit the transcriptions, also a time-consuming process, with 50,000 decrypted words in total," he adds. The team realized relatively quickly that the letters had nothing to do with Italy and were in fact written in French. Other clues alerted them to their author's identity: participles and adjectives in the feminine form, mentions of captivity and a son, and the name"Walsingham" .
The final decryption of part of one letter, which the codebreakers say highlights an error made by the secretary who enciphered the letter in 1580.The final decryption of part of one letter, which the codebreakers say highlights an error made by the secretary who enciphered the letter in 1580.
They kept searching for similar letters and ultimately found more than 55 with the same cipher. Roughly 50 of those had never been published or known to historians, they say.
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