“The Strange Case of Isabell Binnington: Ghosts, Murder and Regicide in Early Modern England” is the topic of the English Department colloquium at noon Friday, Oct. 30, in the Bundy Reading Room of Avery Hall.
In 1662 in the small village of Great Driffield, Yorkshire, a ghost appeared before Isabell Binnington to reveal a brutal murder that had occurred 14 years earlier. Binnington thereupon embarked upon a quest to secure justice for the ghost, demanding his recognition by both secular and religious authorities and warning of a possible plot against the newly restored King Charles II.
Todd Butler, an associate professor of English who first uncovered this case in a manuscript held at the Folger Library, will talk about how the various reports of the ghost in both print and manuscript reveal something of both a woman’s experience with the law in Renaissance England and how the telling of a story shapes both historical and contemporary processes of justice.
