Sinéad Spearing
Author | Historian
My work draws together psychology, history, memoir, archeology and lived experience to reveal the forgotten female healers, and the stories history distorted or erased.
BOOKS
These books trace the roots of the women who healed — through herb, word, and spirit — before they were rewritten as witches.
The Remedies
Old English Medical Remedies, Published by Pen and Sword.
In ninth-century England, a bishop quietly gathers the healing knowledge of pagan women — and unknowingly preserves a remedy that would one day cure MRSA where modern antibiotics fail.
Old English Medical Remedies traces the roots of ancient healing through Bald’s Leechbook and the spell-laced Lacnunga — where cures for the “moon-mad” and protections against elves mingle with herbal treatments and ritual acts.
Both scholarly and lyrical, this book reveals a lost psychological and spiritual intelligence within folk medicine, bringing the voices of early women healers out from centuries of silence.
The Women
A History of Women in Medicine, Published by Pen and Sword.
Long before “witch” became a curse, it belonged to a tradition of female physicians — women who travelled between villages carrying knowledge of herbs, ritual, and healing prayer.
A History of Women in Medicine brings these forgotten therapists to light: respected, intuitive practitioners who blended medicine and spirit. Drawing on folklore, archaeological evidence, and Church records, it reveals how their wisdom was slowly recast as heresy — their remedies reframed as devil’s work.
This book traces how centuries of healing were turned into threat, and how the women who once saved lives came to be seen as dangerous.
The Story
Cunning Woman, Published by Breath & Bramble.
Inspired by true events...
Two women. Two centuries. One bloodline bound by a curse.
In 1656, Mary Allen and her mother were tried and hanged for witchcraft in the village of Goudhurst, Kent. Their names faded into the soil, their story nearly forgotten — until now.
In Cunning Woman, history breathes through fiction in a spellbinding tale of ancestral magic, persecution, and quiet remembering.
England, 1657: Alison, a cunning woman and village healer, is falsely accused of murder by witchcraft. With her final breath, she curses her accuser: “May your women forever wane.”
London, 2022: Eden Flynn, an anxious academic researching Old English magic, is invited to an interview beneath Southwark Cathedral. There, the enigmatic Lord James Fabian reveals a haunting family secret: his sister is ill, his daughter afflicted, and no science can save them. Only something older. Something forgotten.
Meet Sinéad
My work began with uncovering the lost medical knowledge of women — healers, midwives, and plant-workers whose expertise once treated body, mind, and spirit long before medicine became modern. Many of these women were persecuted, erased, rewritten, or vilified. My books seek to restore their place in history as practitioners of a sophisticated and deeply integrated form of medicine.
I hold a first-class honours degree in psychology, alongside diplomas in psychotherapy and hypnotherapy, and am the author of Old English Medical Remedies and A History of Women in Medicine, both published by Pen & Sword Books. I have received speaking invitations from organisations including British Society of Pharmacology and The Old Operating Theatre Museum, and my work has been featured in Watkins Magazine and PsychTalk, as well as recognised by Jacalyn Duffin.
Alongside historical research, my work has expanded to embrace historical fiction where I have weaved together the real history of these women into a captivating novel: Cunning Woman.
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Miss Honeybug
What a wonderful book this was! I enjoy my fiction but I also crave for well documented books filled with interesting facts, research and in depth analysis. This is one of those books that left me captivated by the subject and wanting to know more about it.
Professor Duffin.
The Natural History Museum, London
Intelligently and clearly written, with the support of relevant quotes from a range of Anglo-Saxon texts... the eleven chapters of the book introduce the reader to a fascinating world where the supernatural is commonplace, and the timing of the harvest of appropriate therapeutic herbs, sympathetic magic, ritual proclamations, transference, numerology, amulets, charms and talismans, were all used in the treatment of the sick.
Frankie
I was intrigued by the book the moment I spotted it and knew I had to read it and I am so pleased that I got the chance to. It is a remarkable read, I found it to be very hard-hitting and yet sensitive to those women it tells the stories of, it is a book that should be read by everyone, not just women who like me are interested in women’s history and celebrating how wonderful these women were but by all. I can guarantee there will be something within these pages that will intrigue everyone.