www.stevenconnor.com/dumbstruck/archive/barton.htm -
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Published on: 9/29/2007
Last Visited: 9/29/2007
Compiled by Steven Connor as part of The Dumbstruck Archive, a continuing, online supplement to Dumbstruck: A Cultural History of Ventriloquism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
In Easter 1525, a servant girl named Elizabeth Barton fell ill in the house of her master in the Kent village of Aldington.After suffering for seven months with pains, swelling of the throat and trance-like fits of immobility, she began to have clairvoyant visions of events occurring far distant, along with visions of souls in the afterlife.She also gave voice to oracular revelations concerning the mass and confession.Her celebrity reached the ears of Archbishop Warham in Canterbury, who sent an episcopal commission to investigate her.After this commission concluded that she was neither unorthodox, nor a dissembler, she was carried in triumph to the chapel of Court-le-Street, where she had a convulsive prophetic fit and was miraculously cured of her condition.
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Steven Connor, Dumbstruck: A Cultural History of Ventriloquism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp.116-19, 121