Welcome to the History Extra podcast, fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History Magazine.

From true crime pamphlets to reports from the scaffold, early modern Britain was gripped by tales of women who killed. But were these

cases as common as they seemed, or was something else at play? Speaking to Loringood,

historian Blessing Adams explores the obsession with female murderers in this period,

and considers what it tells us about historical attitudes

to gender, justice and power. We're talking about your book, Thou Savage Woman, Female

Killers in early modern Britain. Now, you've written a book about murder in this period more

generally, but what brought you to write this one

focused on crimes committed by women in particular? Well, as I was researching my first book,

I was reading through an awful lot of sort of like the true crime literature of the day,

an awful lot of it. And something that was jumping out at me was just how much of it was

disproportionately about female killers. Just reading this source, you'd think to yourself was of it. And something that was jumping out at me was just how much of it was disproportionately

about female killers. Just reading this source, you'd think to yourself, was there an

epidemic of female killers in this period? What was going on? There wasn't an epidemic

of female killers. Women hardly ever killed. But there seemed to be a real obsession with the

idea of women killing and especially the idea of women killing their nearest and dearest.

I was just so fascinated. The question that was kind of going around in my head as I started

thinking about writing this book was, why? What's the obsession with female killers in the early

modern period? And that's sort of what was driving me through the writing of this book.

I'm really interested in stories of these women who killed, but I'm also really interested in like the obsession

with female killers as well. That is a very clear thread in the book. And it's clear just how

sensationalised these crimes are. How do we see them represented in newspapers and other media

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