Author Archives

An American born writer living in the Pendle region of Northern England, Mary Sharratt’s book ILLUMINATIONS: A NOVEL OF HILDEGARD VON BINGEN, won the 2013 Nautilus Gold Award, Better Books for a Better World. Her new novel, THE DARK LADY'S MASK: A NOVEL OF SHAKESPEARE'S MUSE, tells the tale of the groundbreaking Renaissance women poet Aemilia Bassano Lanier and will be published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in April 2016.

Her short fiction has appeared in the Welsh crime fiction anthology STARLINGS AND OTHER STORIES, in TWIN CITIES NOIR, and many other journals and anthologies. She is also the co-editor of the fiction anthology, BITCH LIT, devoted to female anti-heroes, strong women who break all the rules.

Her articles have appeared in WALL STREET JOURNAL, HUFFINGTON POST, PUBLISHER'S WEEKLY, and MINNESOTA MAGAZINE. She is a regular blogger for FEMINISM AND RELIGION.

Visit her website: www.marysharratt.com

• My Heroine’s Journey: Writing Women Back in History by Mary Sharratt

  By Mary Sharratt on May 19, 2018 • ( 24 )

  

  We have been lost to each other for so long. My name means nothing to you. My memory is dust.              This is not your fault or mine. The chain connecting mother to daughter was… Read More ›

• In the footprints of Machig Lapdron by Mary Sharratt

  By Mary Sharratt on November 29, 2017 • ( 21 )

  

    Machig Lapdron, female Tantric Buddhist mystic and lineage founder I’ve just returned from an illuminating trip to Bhutan, high in the Himalayas. Bhutan is a Buddhist kingdom and the world’s youngest democracy. On our last full day in this… Read More ›

• Book Review: FLORENCE IN ECSTASY by Jessie Chaffee

  By Mary Sharratt on September 7, 2017 • ( 10 )

  

    Jessie Chaffee‘s Florence in Ecstasy is the most luminous debut novel I have read in a very long time. Imagine, if you will, a darker and more literary version of Elizabeth Gilbert’s popular spiritual seeker’s memoir, Eat Pray Love. This… Read More ›

• The Motherhood of God by Mary Sharratt

  By Mary Sharratt on July 11, 2017 • ( 26 )

  

  Doing a recent talk on pioneering woman writers, I like to do the Before Jane Austen test with my audience. Who can name a single woman writer in the English language before Jane Austen? Alas, because woman have been written… Read More ›

• Shakespeare’s Sister Revisited: A Circle of Female Lineage by Mary Sharratt

  By Mary Sharratt on May 10, 2017 • ( 21 )

  

  What do groundbreaking 17th century poet, Aemilia Bassano Lanier, and 20th century feminist icon, Virginia Woolf, have in common? A lot actually. In her 1929 essay, “A Room of One’s Own,” Woolf imagines the tragedy of Shakespeare’s brilliant sister, Judith,… Read More ›

• Straight from the Horse’s Mouth: Celebrating Epona by Mary Sharratt

  By Mary Sharratt on March 8, 2017 • ( 20 )

  

        The following is a guest post by Mary Sharratt’s Welsh mare, Miss Boo aka Queen Boudicca   The ancient Romans and Gauls knew something that many modern day humans have forgotten. Mares are divine. The worship of… Read More ›

• The Power of Silence by Mary Sharratt

  By Mary Sharratt on January 11, 2017 • ( 31 )

  

  In darkest midwinter, in the hectic rush of the holiday season and its often anticlimactic aftermath, I find myself craving silence and solitude. I’m in hibernation mode and want to curl up in a cave like a bear and sleep…. Read More ›

• Mother Demdike, Ancestor of My Heart, Part 1 by Mary Sharratt

  By Mary Sharratt on November 4, 2016 • ( 10 )

  

    Pendle Hill, seen from the back of my house, in May. The Soul of Gaia is the numinous earth beneath my feet, her soil cradling the bones and the stories of the ancestors who have died into the land… Read More ›

• Calling on the Muse: A Meditation for Creative Spirits by Mary Sharratt

  By Mary Sharratt on September 14, 2016 • ( 19 )

  

  The world at large might view artists and writers as free spirits rocking la vie bohème, but creative people know that it’s much more complicated than that, especially if we’re striving to earn even a modest living from our work…. Read More ›

• Book Review by Mary Sharratt: ESTHER by Rebecca Kanner

  By Mary Sharratt on July 13, 2016 • ( 23 )

  

    We have been lost to each other for so long. My name means nothing to you. My memory is dust. This is not your fault or mine. The chain connecting mother to daughter was broken and the word passed… Read More ›

• American Renaissance Festivals and the Yearning for Merry England

  By Mary Sharratt on May 11, 2016 • ( 6 )

  

  When I was a student in the 1980s, I spent my late summer weekends in another realm. Donning a green gown I had sewn myself, I became a Renaissance woman, or a low-budget facsimile thereof, my cheap, silver-plated goblet hanging… Read More ›

• Rewriting Religion: the radical poetry of Aemilia Bassano Lanier by Mary Sharratt

  By Mary Sharratt on March 9, 2016 • ( 19 )

  

      Aemilia Bassano Lanier (also spelled Lanyer) is the heroine of my new novel The Dark Lady’s Mask.  Born in 1569, she was the highly educated daughter of an Italian court musician—a man thought to have been a Marrano,… Read More ›

• Lucy Pick’s Pilgrimage by Mary Sharratt

  By Mary Sharratt on January 13, 2016 • ( 13 )

  

  In medieval Europe, religious devotion provided an alternate narrative for women’s lives in a male-dominated culture. Defiant women who stood up for themselves in the face of rape, incest, and murder were hailed as virgin martyrs. Religious vocations, such as… Read More ›

• The Pendle Witches and Their Magic by Mary Sharratt

  By Mary Sharratt on November 11, 2015 • ( 18 )

  

  In 1612, in one of the most meticulously documented witch trials in English history, seven women and two men from Pendle Forest in Lancashire, Northern England were executed at Lancaster Castle. In court clerk Thomas Potts’s account of the proceedings,… Read More ›

• Embracing Fierceness by Mary Sharratt

  By Mary Sharratt on September 9, 2015 • ( 10 )

  

  Maenad dancing with snake, ancient Greece, ca 450 BCE This post is in part inspired by Donna Henes’s brilliant post, I am Mad. Too often as spiritual women, we are told we have to be nice all the time. Accomodating…. Read More ›

• Were Hildegard’s Visions Caused by Migraines? by Mary Sharratt

  By Mary Sharratt on July 8, 2015 • ( 23 )

  

  Hildegard’s vision of Christ, surrounded by concentric circles of light.     When I was forty-two years and seven months old, Heaven was opened and a fiery light of exceeding brilliance came and permeated my whole brain, and inflamed my… Read More ›

• Hildegard the Healer by Mary Sharratt

  By Mary Sharratt on May 13, 2015 • ( 11 )

  

  Saint Hildegard von Bingen (1098–1179) was not only a visionary Benedictine abbess, composer, and Powerfrau extraordinaire. She was also a physician and healer who developed her own highly original system of medical treatment and holistic dietary philosophy. Saint Benedict of… Read More ›

• Life Begins at 42: Saint Hildegard’s Guide to Becoming a Midlife Powerfrau

  By Mary Sharratt on March 11, 2015 • ( 49 )

  

  We live in a youth-obsessed culture. The cosmetic industry pushes wrinkle creams and hair dye on us while celebrities resort to Botox and surgery to preserve an illusion of eternal girlhood. We live longer than ever before, yet advancing age,… Read More ›

• Journey into Light by Mary Sharratt

  By Mary Sharratt on December 6, 2014 • ( 12 )

  

  December 7 marks the Second Sunday of Advent. Here in Northern England, I find myself plunged into the depths of midwinter darkness. It is in this dark womb of stillness that the Light is reborn. Through the ages and across… Read More ›

• Hildegard: A Saint Eight Centuries in the Making

  By Mary Sharratt on September 24, 2014 • ( 23 )

  

  The visionary abbess Hildegard von Bingen (1098-1179) has long been regarded as a saint, with her feast day of September 17, yet she was only officially canonized in May 2012. Why did it take the Vatican over eight centuries to… Read More ›

• Book Review: Hild & The Patron Saint of Ugly by Mary Sharratt

  By Mary Sharratt on June 7, 2014 • ( 16 )

  

  Literature touches our spirit in a way that film, television, and even art cannot. Instead of presenting the passive viewer with a visual image, good writing demands our participation and co-creation. The words become the springboard for our own imagined… Read More ›

• The Soul is Symphonic: Reclaiming Sacred Music

  By Mary Sharratt on March 26, 2014 • ( 29 )

  

  Here is a hymn of praise, a beautiful and intimate piece meant to be sung. Hail, O greenest branch, sprung forth on the breeze of prayers. . . . . a beautiful flower sprang from you which gave all parched… Read More ›

• Awakening to Life: Hildegard’s Cure for Seasonal Depression by Mary Sharratt

  By Mary Sharratt on December 29, 2013 • ( 26 )

  

  In midwinter 2002, I moved from the sun-drenched San Francisco Bay Area to Lancashire, in northern England, further north than I had ever lived. In bleak December, it was as though someone had switched off the lights. The sun barely… Read More ›

• Voice of Wisdom: What Hildegard Means Now by Mary Sharratt

  By Mary Sharratt on January 19, 2013 • ( 13 )

  

  Hildegard von Bingen (1098–1179) was a visionary abbess and polymath. She composed an entire corpus of sacred music and wrote nine books on subjects as diverse as theology, cosmology, botany, medicine, linguistics, and human sexuality, a prodigious intellectual outpouring that… Read More ›