Stone Tongued
"We counted all the non-witches. The waterlogged women
parcelled in their tiny, tidy, Christian graves."
In the depths of the Shrewsbury Museum, there is a metal contraption designed to silence. Its last recorded victim, Mary Jones, has been forgotten from history, but we find her listed among those punished for speaking during meals at the Oswestry House of Industry.
Placida's legacy is written upon her gravestone, uncovered in the Roman ruins of Shropshire. Her ghost flickers each time her name is spoken.
Queen Amanirenas of Kush fought the Roman Empire, led armies, lost an eye, a husband, and a son, yet is mysteriously absent from articles on the bronze Mero Head: a trophy she brought back to Mero and buried beneath the temple in an act of defiance.
Cartimandua reigned in her own right, threw her enemies in chains and faced off against the men who sought to take her throne. Julie d'Aubigny infiltrated a nunnery to rescue the woman she loved, travelled France as a master swordsman, and an opera singer. Grace Gifford painted a masterpiece on the wall of her prison cell, a prison where women graffitied their names, crimes, and sentences onto the whitewash as a protest against a government that would not acknowledge them as political prisoners.
Women sank quietly as the air left their lungs, accusations of witchcraft dragging them into the water.
Stone Tongued is remembrance and protest. It is what happens when the fragments and shadows find a voice.
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