The Folklore & Women Course

with Prof Diane Purkiss

Prof Diane Purkiss opens the course by dismantling the idea that folklore is something old and finished. Through Anzac biscuits, a Mel Gibson film, memes, crossed fingers and the rituals of birthdays, weddings and Valentine’s Day, she shows that we are all still making folklore every day — and asks why so much of it quietly works to define and constrain the lives of women.

• Why memes, biscuits and films all count as folklore
• The hidden logic behind lucky charms and bad-luck beliefs
• How the calendar we inherit sidelines women’s lives
• What weddings, birthdays and rites of passage really mark

with Prof Diane Purkiss

Prof Diane Purkiss turns to the wintry women of myth: the child-devouring Alpine goddess Perchta, Mother Holle, Italy’s Befana, the Scottish Cailleach, Baba Yaga and Hans Andersen’s Snow Queen. She traces how ambivalent winter goddesses were slowly twisted into monstrous, child-eating hags, and makes the case for reclaiming the crone as a figure of wisdom, power and creative energy rather than something to fear.

• How winter goddesses became feared child-devouring hags
• Why ovens, snow and firewood recur in these tales
• The Irish sovereignty hag who chooses Ireland’s king
• Reading Frozen’s Elsa as a reclaimed Snow Queen

with Prof Diane Purkiss

Prof Diane Purkiss traces the mermaid from her origins as the fierce ‘merwif’ of Beowulf — Grendel’s mother, a sword-wielding warrior woman — to the tiny, waistless figure Disney handed us. Along the way she uncovers the queer longing coded into Hans Andersen’s tale, tours the sirens, nymphs, silkies and Ladies of the Lake haunting Britain’s coasts, and asks how a formidable watery woman was ever tamed into a pretty girl.

• How Grendel’s mother was mistranslated from warrior into monster
• The queer longing hidden in Andersen’s and Disney’s mermaid
• Sirens, nymphs, silkies and Ladies of the Lake explained
• Why old medicine cast the female body as cold and watery

with Prof Diane Purkiss

Prof Diane Purkiss steps into the fairy otherworld — a realm imagined alongside our own and always ruled by a queen. She follows the Fairy Queen from the night-riding goddess Diana to the Gaelic Otherworld, the ballads of Tam Lin and Thomas the Rhymer, and the Scottish witches who named her as the source of their healing power. Along the way: changelings, hearth-sweeping brownies, and why the Kirk found a woman with supernatural authority so unbearable.

• Why fairyland was imagined as a matriarchy ruled by a queen
• How Diana’s night-riding horde became the Fairy Queen
• Tam Lin, Thomas the Rhymer and the captive elf knight
• What Scottish fairy witches confessed about their power

with Prof Diane Purkiss

Prof Diane Purkiss asks why so many of mythology’s monsters are female — and what that reveals about the cultures that dreamed them up. From John Knox’s ‘monstrous regiment of women’ to Medusa, the harpies and the child-stealing Lamia, she traces the monster as a warning, a misshapen body and a way to condemn women who stray out of their lane, before arriving at Frankenstein, Dracula and the monstrous feminine on screen.

• Why the word ‘monster’ first meant a warning from God
• How Medusa reaches her peak power only once beheaded
• Why so many monsters are serpents from the waist down
• How the pregnant body became the root of monstrous horror

with Prof Diane Purkiss

In this final session Purkiss separates the witch we imagine — empowering, feminist, or green and cackling — from the real women who were tried, and often hanged. She busts the familiar myths (no Inquisition, no mass burnings, no gentle pagan midwives), traces the figure back to the goddess Hecate and the witch Medea, and tells the stories of two accused women, Ursley Kemp of St Osyth and the Pendle witch Elizabeth Southerns.

• Why the broomstick signals a refusal to do housework
• Why English witches were hanged, not burned
• How witch-hunting rose with literacy, not superstition
• The real women behind the St Osyth and Pendle trials