Thou Savage Woman: Female Killers in Early Modern Britain
Blessin Adams traded police work investigating today’s crime in the Norfolk Constabulary for academia tracing the lives and deaths of people in Early Modern England. Awash with pamphlets, ballads and woodcuts broadcasting bloodthirsty tales of traitorous wives, greedy mistresses, cunning female poisoners; of child killers and spiteful witches, stories of women wholly and unnaturally wicked.
These were printed or sung, tacked to the walls of alehouses, sold in the streets for pennies and read voraciously to thrill all. But why? When the vast majority of murders then (and now) are committed by men. Blessin tells stories of women whose violent crimes shattered the narrow confines of their gender – and whose notoriety revealed a society that was at once repulsed by and attracted to murderous female rebellion. Thou Savage Woman reminds us that women in the past had voices, that they sought to control their bodies and their environments and that they also had the capacity for committing acts of unspeakable violence.
