ABSTRACT

This article explores the textual and theatrical spaces in which the figure of Mother Shipton trifled with history, hierarchy and seditious discursive strategies in Restoration and eighteenth-century London. Shipton resonated in the popular imagination not merely as a faux-historical personage but also as a fantasy hermeneutic key operating outside of linear history, a linguistic marker of oracular knowledge communicated by performances that belied a tidy shift from oral to print-centred genres in the period.

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