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A family of witches

A family of witches

Emma Whipday explores the demonisation of single mothers in English witch trials.

Arts & Ideas · BBC Radio 4

April 5, 202314m 18s

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Show Notes

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