Sinéad Spearing
Writer | Medical Folklorist | Weaver of Root, Ritual, and Remembering...
I am a gatherer — of stories, fragments, and traces in the soil. My work reclaims the healing knowledge of early English women: those who worked with plants and prayer, and were later rewritten as witches. I write to remember them — and in doing so, remember myself.
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New Release
A novel born of the women I’ve studied — the healers, the midwives, the cunning ones they tried to silence.
(Please Note: This is the new enhanced edition previously released under the title The Witch of Tessingham Hall.)
Cunning Woman
Cursed by witches, a heroine rises…
England, 1657. Alison, a folk-healer, is falsely accused of murder by witchcraft — and with her final breath, she curses her accuser: “May your women forever wane.”
London, 2022. Eden Flynn, an anxious academic of Old English magic, is summoned to an interview beneath Southwark Cathedral. There, the enigmatic geneticist Lord James Fabian reveals a secret: his sister is ill, his daughter showing signs of the same affliction. Science has failed. Magic may be their only hope.
Drawn into the haunting legacy of Alison’s curse, Eden must rediscover forgotten healing rites — and face the dark undercurrent that binds her to the past. But can she live with what she must unleash to set them free?
A novel of ancestral magic, buried knowledge, and the quiet power of a woman who chooses to remember.
Meet Sinéad
Nightshade and wormwood grow wild in my garden. Borage and chamomile pop up in strange places — chamomile in particular forms clumps around the cellar door, rooting into the sandstone, unearthing secrets.
I follow its roots — through memory, ritual, and buried knowing — to find the healer before she became the witch, and to listen for the women they tried to burn from memory.
My name is Sinéad Spearing. I’m a writer, medical folklorist, and guardian of women’s wisdom — past, hidden, and half-remembered. I’ve spent years tracing the healing knowledge of early English women: those who worked with plants, prayer, and the psyche, and were later rewritten as witches or erased altogether. Their stories have shaped my life. In truth, they mirror it.
I trained first as a classical musician and taught for years, though the path never fit. It was only after returning to university to study psychology and philosophy that I began to follow the threads that pulled me elsewhere — into ancient manuscripts, unmarked graves, and quiet ancestral memory.
I’ve written books on early English medicine and the women who kept it alive — Old English Medical Remedies and A History of Women in Medicine — and been an invited speaker for The British Society of Pharmacology and The Old Operating Theatre Museum in London. My work has been praised by Professor Jacalyn Duffin of the Natural History Museum, and published in Watkins Magazine, PsychTalk, and others.
Alongside the lives of the women, I study the remedies themselves — translating Old English medical texts like Bald’s Leechbook III and Lacnunga, and researching their healing properties using both historical context and modern insights. One such remedy has now been shown to cure MRSA where antibiotics fail. My current work seeks to uncover what other secrets still lie waiting in those pages — not just as folklore, but as medicine.
But beneath the research is something more personal. For years, I lived in fear — silenced by betrayal, grief, and even spiritual persecution. When I published my first book, some in my own parish believed I had invited darkness. I remember looking out across the fields one night and wondering: if this were the seventeenth century, would they be coming with pitchforks?
What I didn’t know then was that my ancestors lived here too. That the gravestones outside the church bear my family name. That the house I now live in once held a jail. That the women I write about may have touched the same stones I pass every day.
Breath and Bramble is the name of my forthcoming book — and the thread that now runs through all of this. It’s a story of healing, both personal and historical. A return to what was sacred. A remembering of the healer before she became the witch.
It is, above all, a homecoming.
If any part of this story is yours too, welcome.
The fire’s lit.
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BOOKS
These books trace the roots of the women who healed — through herb, word, and spirit — before they were rewritten as witches. Each one is a piece of the larger remembering.
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 Bramble Path
This is The Bramble Path — a trail of fragments, reflections, and quiet rememberings from a life spent listening to the land, the stories, and the women they tried to burn from memory.
Some of these posts are part of the book I'm writing. Others are simply me, walking barefoot, noticing what grows.
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.