please…..John Milton didn’t die for this

Absolutely amazing find outside my flat today, devastatingly chic imo

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Like many Civil War pamphlets, the chaotic violence of it is kind of disturbing (she does get shot eventually). But I like to remember this woman, whoever she was (if she ever existed), long before she ever encountered those soldiers: taking to the water, pushing off, and skimming happily away

The best part, though, is when she (nearly) makes her escape by taking to the water on a “boord…standing firm but upright”, and then “turning and winding it which way she pleased, making it pastime to her”.

When the soldiers were ordered to open fire on her, she “with a deriding and loud laughter…caught the bullets in her hands and chew’d them”, sort of The Matrix-style

Her story is told in this Civil War pamphlet, “A Most Certain, Strange and True Discovery of a Witch”, which relates her discovery by the army of the Earl of Essex.

Now that my PhD is over, keen to write (and post) more about non-thesis-related early modern stuff. I’ll start with maybe my favourite finding, which is what I believe to be the earliest documented incidence of surfboarding, in 1643, by a witch