Tag: History
Femme fatale, martyr, or tragic romantic heroine?
In this fourth Spy Week post, Lucy R. Hinnie explores the threat–political and gendered–embodied by Mary I of Scotland, and the 16th century espionage that led to her ultimate downfall.
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Insight into one of ‘The Bletchley Girls’
In our second post for Edinburgh Spy Week, Tessa Dunlop shares the time she spent with Rozanne Colchester, one of the many women who worked as codebreakers at Bletchley Park during World War II.
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What if Holloway Prison could reflect on its closure?
If these walls could talk? Eithne Cullen imagines what Holloway Prison would have to say about the announcement of its closure in 2015, after more than a century of housing some of the UK’s most notable female prisoners.
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Their dangerous legacy in the post-Yugoslav space
The contribution of ‘partizanke’, or female partisan fighters, to the Yugoslav liberation war was unprecedented in occupied Europe. Here, Chiara Bonfiglioli explores the agency of these women and the reverberations of their actions to the present day.
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A dangerously honest and unconventional writer
In the first of a series of posts from Scottish PEN (a centre of PEN International, the worldwide association of writers promoting literature and freedom of expression), Faith Pullin explores the life and writing of Rebecca West.
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From 5th century BCE plays to their contemporary adaptions
In the lead up to a new adaptation of Aeschylus’s ‘The Oresteia’, Olga Taxidou reflects on the dangerous women of classical Greek theatre, and the changing treatment of these characters through the centuries.
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‘Lucretia Borgia or only a boarding school miss’?
Madeleine Smith’s trial for the murder of her lover, Emile L’Angelier, in 1857, combined those twin Victorian obsessions, sex and death, in a way that not only led to questions about womanhood in general, but about the whole fabric of society.
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Poet Claire Askew has composed three powerful new works to her probable 16th century ancestor.
A scholar and a poet too, Anne was the first English woman to demand a divorce, and the only woman on record to be tortured in the Tower of London. Could the men of the rack force Anne to give up her dangerous secrets?
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