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Renaissance English History Podcast: A Show About the Tudors

She Tested It. They Ignored It. The Women Who Invented Knowledge Before Science Had a Name.

Renaissance English History Podcast: A Show About the Tudors

Heather Teysko

History

4.6624 Ratings

🗓️ 7 April 2026

⏱️ 18 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

In the late 1400s, two women were doing something radical: generating knowledge and insisting it counted. Margery Kempe was building an evidence base for her divine visions. Caterina Sforza was annotating her alchemical recipes with "proven and certain." They never met, but they were solving the same problem. One manuscript was found in a ping-pong cupboard in 1934. The other is still missing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0

Jamie Lang and Sophie Haboo have arrived on Disney Plus.

0:04.0

We're having a baby.

0:06.0

We're having a baby.

0:07.0

I've always wanted to be mom.

0:09.0

And we're bringing you on our journey through everything.

0:12.0

I have no idea what we're doing.

0:13.0

Thank you. I have more of an idea.

0:15.0

I think of it like a Tamagocchi.

0:17.0

At the end of all of this...

0:20.0

We're going to have a little baby. Raising Chelsea, a Hulu

0:23.7

original series streaming exclusively on Disney Plus. 18 plus subscription required T's and T supply.

0:30.1

So I won't tell you about a ping pong ball. It's 1934, an English gentry family called the Butler

0:36.6

Bowdens are having a house party at their place in Derbyshire.

0:41.3

Someone steps on the ping pong ball.

0:44.6

The colonel goes to a cupboard and finds a new one.

0:47.9

But instead of a new one, he finds a pile of old books and papers, and he is reportedly not pleased.

0:55.3

He apparently said something along the lines of,

0:57.4

I'm going to put this whole lot in the bonfire tomorrow.

1:01.1

A guest suggested maybe getting somebody to look at it first.

1:06.2

Good call, because what fell out of that cupboard was the only surviving manuscript of the first

1:13.9

autobiography ever written in English. The entire recorded inner life of a medieval woman named

1:21.5

Marjorie Kemp, who had been essentially lost to history for 400 years, nearly ended up as kindling because

...

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