Ripped, burned, and smuggled away from the historical record, the history of intelligence-gathering is infamously difficult to pin down. Spy stories tend to spin into shadowy legend as a result, even in the best-documented cases, such as the entrapment of Mary Queen of Scots. Where texts are often silent, material traces can offer rich insight into the day-to-day practice of intelligence work. That is the innovative approach taken by Nadine Akkerman and Pete Langman in Spycraft: Tricks and Tools of the Dangerous Trade from Elizabeth I to the Restoration, a history of early modern English intelligence professions and technologies.

The book begins by introducing us to Arthur Gregory, a little-known counter-espionage agent, at work in the Tower of London. Gregory is the first of several “dark artificers” to appear as protagonists (and antagonists) throughout the book. If we imagine James Bond when we think of a modern spy, these men and women are instead compared to “Q”: secretaries, cryptologists, alchemists, and magicians whose prodigious knowledge and willingness to experiment made them invaluable to the early modern state.

Yet Akkerman and Langman warn that this is not a story of lone geniuses, but rather their integration into collaborative intelligence units. Professionalizing institutions meant codifying expertise. Each chapter takes one such trick or tool of the trade as its focus, linking theory with real-world case studies. These run the gamut of famous intelligence operations from the beginning of Elizabeth's reign to the Restoration, including the Casket Letters (chapter 1, “Fraud & Forgery”), the Babington Plot (chapter 2, “Ciphers & Codes”), various Catholics’ conspiracies (chapter 3, “Disguise & Distraction”), and the Gunpowder Plot (chapter 4, “Inks & Invisibility”). The authors argue that the status of Elizabethan England as a “hotbed of conspiracy” forced a more rapid development of espionage and counter-espionage techniques, thereby making that same development “more visible” than in other countries (7–8). By working at the intersection of the English State Papers and popular publications, such as Giambattista della Porta's Natural Magick, the authors give new voice to silent substances—such as ink, wax, and lamp-black—and the practices that they dictated.

Chapter 5 (“Stilettos & Storytelling”) takes the widest lens, inspecting the English fear of assassination in the context of European confessional struggles. The authors also move here from reality as grounded in sense perception, to the occasionally reality-warping effects of fear, particularly of poison. “Coda: The Blackchamber” looks across a century of letter interception and ahead to the later seventeenth-century institutionalization of postal interference. This was a transition from peripatetic, ad hoc intelligence work to cryptanalysis institutions. The overall history of English intelligence is nonetheless revealed to be a tragedy, as competition, rather than cooperation, meant many missed opportunities. Rival spy chiefs and rampant corruption trapped intelligence into an increasingly tired bag of tricks.

Spycraft is an impressive and welcome contribution to the history of statecraft and diplomacy. The role of “she-intelligencers” and cross-dressing as disguise is especially noteworthy, contradicting as it does a strict interpretation of politics as a masculine sphere. The authors succeed in demonstrating how methodologies from material history and the history of science and technology can make even “the more occluded events in history” newly “tangible” (4). The appendix of recipes and colorful visual accompaniment (not to mention the glow-in-the-dark cover) offers instructors a clear way to engage students in the same methodologies as the authors undertake. Recreation is not just entertainment, however; the authors clearly indicate how material details enrich and often contradict past scholarship on even the best-known intelligence operations. The second chapter, for example, reveals new detail about the material journey of Mary Queen of Scots’ correspondence and cipher key in a manner reminiscent of another classic, John Bossy's Under the Molehill: An Elizabethan Spy Story (2001).

During this deep dive, the authors caution readers against accepting what cryptanalysts had to say at face value, as “the narrative of ciphers and codes always falling to cunning cryptanalysts is one spread largely by the cryptanalysts themselves, it appears” (107). At the same time, concluding that English intelligence was a story of “missed opportunity” (228) seems to inherit some rhetoric from the petitions of under-appreciated secretaries and lobbying artificers, and even the rival spy chiefs, who longed for centralization (under their command). Intelligencers relied on convincing state patrons that they were falling behind, especially to international rivals. Spycraft gestures outward at such continental examples, especially to the enviable Venetian intelligence apparatus, but remains a primarily English story. That scope limitation is very understandable, given all that it achieves, and the book presents an invaluable school of spycraft for future scholars undertaking work in other geographic and temporal contexts.

The undeniably entertaining premise of Spycraft is executed with aplomb. The authors pair methodological heft with elegant, accessible prose. Any reader can enjoy learning and practicing the techniques of spy-craft alongside the professionalizing intelligence agents of past centuries. In this, Spycraft provides a welcome alternative to chasing shadows.