The Return of old Mother Leakey: Ghosts and Stories in Early Modern Britain and Ireland

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The project begins by investigating a sequence of events in mid-seventeenth-century England and Ireland, specifically the reported appearance of the ghost of Susan Leakey in Somerset in 1635-6 and the execution for sodomy of John Atherton, Bishop of Waterford, in Dublin in 1640. Atherton was Leakey's son-in-law, committed incest with his wife sister and perhaps colluded in their child's murder. It goes on to demonstrate how competing accounts and interpretations of these events circulated widely in oral culture and in print over the succeeding three centuries. In the process it addresses questions about the nature of historic memory, and supplies a case study in the modern construction of both 'history' and 'folklore'. The project is to be published as a book by Oxford University Press in the spring of 2007, entitles Mother Leakey and the Bishop: A Ghost Story. My hope is that the book will encourage a wider conception of what is possible through 'micro-historical' investigation.