Voltaire Foundation Annual Digital Enlightenment Studies Lecture: Ruth Ahnert on Unmasking Aliases: A New Way to Find Hidden Identities in the Tudor State Papers
This paper will introduce a new network-based method for identifying aliases in early modern correspondence. Espionage and conspiracy alike relied upon proliferating pseudonyms, shared personae, and carefully segmented channels of communication — deliberately fragmenting the evidence, and thereby the historical archives we have available to us today. While scholars have painstakingly attributed individual aliases, the absence of a systematic framework has limited our ability to assess competing identifications or to see how resolving one identity reshapes the wider network. The paper proposes a neighbourhood-based, pairwise prediction method that detects structurally plausible alias matches within correspondence networks. Crucially, these predictions are not treated as conclusions but as prompts for archival testing through palaeography, packet structure, internal textual “seepages,” and external testimony. The paper will outline the underlying concept for the method, how it works, and some of the cases it allows us to examine.
