By Guest Post by Rachel Winchcombe In early modern Europe life expectancy was low. A male property owner living in fifteenth-century England would not expect to live past his thirty third birthday, whilst life expectancy in eighteenth-century Paris could be as low as twenty four.1 In this environment of early death,
The Derbyshire Damsel
Martha Taylor: The Derbyshire Damsel In the late 1600s, a young woman in the Derbyshire Peak District became a celebrity for a brief time. Martha Taylor, born in February 1651, was an adolescent who had a history of ill-health starting from when she was about ten years old. She became