In this episode David Parry and Philip Schwyzer speak to Dr Sarah-Jayne Ainsworth about her PhD research on women’s wills in the southwest of England from 1625 to 1660.
We discuss how wills can be read as literary and religious texts as well as legal texts, and how women negotiated their individual identities and religious convictions in dialogue with social and legal convention through the act of will-writing. Sarah-Jayne is a Team Leader in Special Collections for the University of Exeter library service and also teaches in the Exeter Department of English and Creative Writing.