Main content

A spinning pig, uncanny knitting and magical seduction come up in a witch trial of Mary Sutton. Emma Whipday unpicks the language used to accuse her of magic.

An 8-year-old who condemns his own mother to execution in 1582: New Generation Thinker Emma Whipday, who researches Renaissance literature at Newcastle University, has been reading witch trial records from Elizabethan and Jacobean England to explore how they depict single mothers. And she finds chilling echoes of their language in newspaper articles in our own times.

Producer: Ruth Watts

Emma Whipday is a 麻豆官网首页入口/AHRC New Generation Thinker 2022 on the scheme which puts research on the radio. You can find her sharing her thoughts on Free Thinking episodes about Lady Macbeth, Shakespeare, Cross-dressing, Step-mothers, and Tudor families.

Available now

14 minutes

Broadcast

  • Wed 5 Apr 2023 22:45

Death in Trieste

Death in Trieste

A 1760s murder still informs ideas about aesthetics, a certain sort of sex, and death.

Watch: My Deaf World

Watch: My Deaf World

Five compelling experiences of what it is like to be deaf in 21st-century Britain.

The Book that Changed Me

Five figures from the arts and science introduce books that changed their lives and work.

Download The Essay

Download The Essay

Download all the episodes from the series and listen at your leisure.

Podcast