Vanessa Braganza

“When all else about an individual dies or is devoured,” writes Harvard Griffin GSAS student Vanessa Braganza, “ciphered documents [those written in code] can preserve their identity beneath the calcified surface of history.”

In her 2022 Harvard Horizons project, “The Secret-Seekers: Renaissance Writers and the Birth of Code,” Braganza draws evidence for her pronouncement from the life—and death—of Mary, Queen of Scots. It’s a story we think we know, if only from its many depictions on film; Katherine Hepburn, Vanessa Redgrave, and, most recently, Saoirse Ronan have all portrayed the doomed Stuart queen first imprisoned and then executed by her royal rival Elizabeth. But her letters, written in code, and her poetry upend our notions of Mary as a woman with no agency, swept under by a powerful leader and the currents of history.

“Popular depictions tend to see Mary as passive, beautiful, and unfortunate,” Braganza says. “But even when she is under house arrest, her ambition has not dwindled. It comes out in these ciphered letters that, by God, she is doing everything she can not only to get out but also to take the throne of England from Elizabeth. She’s going to go down fighting.”

Ironically, the secrecy that enabled Mary’s agency is one reason why her authentic voice is often lost in the way we remember her—and why many of her letters and poems remain encoded. Having to decipher Mary’s works simply to read them is a barrier for historians and literary scholars. “And because of the absence of her written voice in the historical record, there's a tendency to see her more as a tragic figure rather than as an actor or agent,” Braganza says. “The result of that impression of passivity that starts with her loss of voice is further loss of voice.”

Braganza sees a different—and more fundamental—kind of agency in the poems of Mary, Queen of Scots than she does in the letters. It’s an insistence on raising her voice—on simply existing—even in the face of annihilation. Braganza points to a passage from a poem Mary wrote in the margin of one of her prayer books during the last year of her life: “I am at once a body deprived of a heart . . . No longer, oh enemies, be envious / Of one who no longer has the disposition for greatness.” (Translated from French.)

“At first it seems like the opposite of agency,” Braganza explains. “She’s hollowed out. But when everything has been taken from you—even your ability to communicate with the outside world—there is a kind of agency in articulating yourself. It’s the dignity of utterance that says, ‘my existence matters . . . or even just, ‘I am.’”

Sadly, the proximate cause of Mary’s death was the failure of her code. She neglected to refresh the symbols in her cipher, so when her correspondence with Anthony Babington, the man plotting Elizabeth's assassination, fell into the hands of the English Queen’s spies, Mary was condemned and executed.

“Mary’s use of a simple substitution cipher proved fatal,” Braganza says. “All of her correspondence was intercepted and decoded by Elizabeth’s network of spies—particularly Thomas Phelippes, a Cambridge linguist who was probably the best codebreaker in England.”

In addition to fostering a more accurate and agential understanding of Mary, Queen of Scots, Braganza says that she wants her work to inspire scholars to look again with fresh eyes at texts they think they know. “It can be as simple as looking beyond your expectations,” she says. For a more general audience, she hopes her work can help non-specialists appreciate the way that historical distance can collapse and people long dead can come alive.

“My favorite moments in my work are when a piece of historical evidence makes someone's way of thinking and feeling completely legible,” says Braganza. “That doesn’t mean ‘fiction-making.’ There are pieces of historical evidence that are incredibly incisive and can bring the person to you as though they're sitting across from you. That's a powerful experience and conducive to non-specialists learning history and finding it interesting—when you find yourself nose to nose with ghosts.”