They Tried to Erase Her

Costanza Piccolomini Bonarelli was immortalized in marble by Gian Lorenzo Bernini, only to then be punished by the very world that protected him.

Her story moves through desire, violence, reputation, and survival in Baroque Rome, revealing how a woman’s life was distorted into scandal while male genius was allowed to remain untouchable. Beyond the famous bust, Costanza emerges as a woman of resilience whose name and work challenge the story history tried to leave behind and demand a deeper reckoning.

CITATIONS:

• Slashed with a knife: the tender sculpture that hides a shocking but common crime against women, https://www.theguardian.com/society/article/2024/jul/28/sculpture-crime-against-women-costanza-piccolomini-bernini
• Costanza Piccolomini, Gian Lorenzo Bernini e quel “fattaccio” del 1638, https://www.centrostudipientini.it/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/01.COSTANZA-PICCOLOMINI.pdf
• The Life of Gian Lorenzo Bernini, https://www.psupress.org/books/titles/978-0-271-03748-6.html?srsltid=AfmBOop5jhKL0zbo2Bz7k8fXDLPX2ToJ6xlTf_cTPQky36GGcmfJ__NK&
• Bernini's Beloved. A Portrait of Costanza Piccolomini, https://www.academia.edu/9995380/Berninis_Beloved_A_Portrait_of_Costanza_Piccolomini
• Sarah McPhee. Bernini’s Beloved: A Portrait of Costanza Piccolomini, https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/668318

King Tamar of Georgia inherited a throne that men wanted to control, then ruled through rebellion, forced marriage, war, diplomacy, and the slow violence of being renamed by history.

Crowned as mepe, or king, she turned a fragile succession into Georgia’s Golden Age, while later writers softened her authority into legend.

Her story reveals how power can be hidden inside translation, how praise can become its own kind of erasure, and how a woman’s reign can survive even when the world keeps trying to make it smaller.

CITATIONS:

• Queen Tamar of Georgia, https://thenewhistoria.org/editorial/queen-tamar/
• Queen Tamar and the Golden Age of the Georgian Kingdom, https://www.atinati.com/news/62f0f1ee4543340038a86e9c
• Images of St Eugenios in Georgia and Cultural and Political Ties with the Empire of Trebizond, https://cjss.ug.edu.ge/index.php/cjss/article/view/205/208
• The date of death of Tamar, the Georgian King of the kings, https://cjss.ug.edu.ge/index.php/cjss/article/view/254
• Georgian Diplomat Queen Tamar, https://www.davidpublisher.com/Public/uploads/Contribute/63180e94b18e1.pdf

Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald was more than the beautiful wife behind a famous name. Her life reveals an artist struggling to claim her own voice while her private words and lived experience were transformed into another man’s legend.

From Montgomery society to Jazz Age fame, from ballet studios to hospital rooms, her story exposes how easily women’s brilliance can be borrowed, doubted, and diminished, and how powerfully it can return when we finally read her on her own terms, beyond the myth that tried to contain her.

CITATIONS:

• Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald, https://encyclopediaofalabama.org/article/zelda-sayre-fitzgerald/
• Gatsby at 100: The Author and His Creation, https://dpul.princeton.edu/gatsby100/feature/princeton-s-fitzgerald-collections
• Friend Husband’s Latest by Zelda Fitzgerald, https://fitzgerald.narod.ru/zelda/friendhusbandslatest.html
• Writing the Body: Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald's Resistance in Save Me the Waltz, https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/fscotfitzrevi.17.1.0102
• A Wizard Cultivator: Zelda Fitzgerald's Save Me the Waltz as Asylum Autobiography, https://www.jstor.org/stable/464300

Lucrezia Borgia has long been reduced to poison, incest, and scandal. This narrative strips away the myths to reveal a woman shaped by power, political violence, and survival in Renaissance Italy.

From pawn to ruler, her life exposes how female authority is distorted, then weaponized and erased. Lucrezia Borgia emerges not as legend, but as a capable leader whose reputation was rewritten to punish resilience.

Her story reveals how history rewards brutality in men while condemning ambition and intelligence in women.

CITATIONS:

• Lucrezia Borgia, https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/history/lucrezia-borgia
• Lucrezia Borgia as Entrepreneur, https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/renaissance-quarterly/article/abs/lucrezia-borgia-as-entrepreneur/FAE13E7E0AF11FE2555416A67A8EFA06
• Lucrezia Borgia: A Woman whose Reputation has been Maligned by History, https://retrospectjournal.com/2024/02/04/lucrezia-borgia-a-woman-whose-reputation-has-been-maligned-by-history/
• Lucrezia Borgia in Spoleto (1499): The Pope's Daughter? Governatorice? Arbitrator? https://www.academia.edu/37765124/Lucrezia_Borgia_in_Spoleto_1499_The_Popes_Daughter_Governatorice_Arbitrator
• The Borgia Family: Rumor and Representation, https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/renaissance-quarterly/article/borgia-family-rumor-and-representation-jennifer-mara-desilva-london-routledge-2020-xii-304-pp-150/0314440FD923328333B028E40D280E30

Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace, imagined computing long before computers existed.

Raised between poetry and mathematics, she recognized that machines could follow instructions, repeat processes, and manipulate symbols beyond numbers. Her notes on the Analytical Engine contained the first computer algorithm, yet her contributions were minimized as later generations of men defined the digital age.

Hers challenges familiar origin stories, exposes gendered gatekeeping, and asks who is remembered as a visionary when technology reshapes the world.

CITATIONS:

• The multifaceted impact of Ada Lovelace in the digital age, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0004370216300224
• The early mathematical education of Ada Lovelace, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17498430.2017.1325297
• Ada and the First Computer, https://www.jstor.org/stable/26058246
• Charles Babbage, Ada Lovelace, and the Bernoulli Numbers, https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.02919
• Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace: First computer programmer, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/359577331_Augusta_Ada_King_Countess_of_Lovelace_First_computer_programmer

Zheng Yi Sao ruled the South China Sea at the height of the Qing Dynasty, commanding hundreds of ships and tens of thousands of pirates. Yet history reduced her to a footnote, a wife, a curiosity.

Her story dismantles the myth of romantic pirate legends and reveals a strategist who forced the empire to negotiate, rewrote the rules of surrender, and exposed how power, gender, and fear shaped the stories allowed to survive. From coastal raids to imperial courts, her legacy challenges who history crowns as legend and who it tries to erase.

CITATIONS:

• Episode 11: Queens of the high seas, https://www.nationalgeographic.com/podcasts/overheard/article/queens-of-the-high-seas
• Primary Source: The Pirate Zheng Yi Sao and a Fine Press Publisher, https://notevenpast.org/primary-source-the-pirate-zheng-yi-sao-and-a-fine-press-publisher/
• Pirate Nations: Maritime Pirates as Escape Societies in Late Imperial China, https://www.jstor.org/stable/24573942
• The Ever-Evolving Legacy of China’s Pirate Queen, https://www.sixthtone.com/news/1010075
• One Woman's Rise to Power: Cheng I's Wife and the Pirates, https://www.jstor.org/stable/41298765?mag=cheng-i-sao-female-pirate

Trota di Salerno was a medieval physician whose medical writings shaped women’s health care across Europe, yet her name was slowly stripped away.

Working in the medical school of Salerno, she documented childbirth, menstruation, infertility, and women’s pain with rare precision and empathy. Her texts survived for centuries under male names, influencing medicine while erasing their author.

This episode traces Trota’s work and the quiet mechanics of her historical erasure, revealing how authority is reassigned, how women are written out of knowledge, and how Trota di Salerno’s voice endures.

CITATIONS:

• Medieval Medicine review, https://www.mattioli1885journals.com/index.php/MedHistor/article/download/11319/10937/95869/
• In Search of an “Authentic” Women’s Medicine: The Strange Fates of Trota of Salerno and Hildegard of Bingen, https://www.ugr.es/~dynamis/completo19/PDF/03.%20Authentic%20Womens%20Medicine.pdf
• The Women of Salerno: Contribution to the Origins of Surgery From Medieval Italy, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0003497597010795
• Two Medieval Female Doctors: A Cross-Cultural Examination of Trota and Tan Yunxian’s Approaches to Menstrual Disorders, https://curarejournal.org/ojs/index.php/cur/article/download/3834/2174/3900
• The Trotula: A Medieval Compendium of Women's Medicine, https://data.isiscb.org/p/isis/citation/CBB906111244/

Before Homer. Before the Bible. Before history learned to remember men. Enheduanna of Ur was a high priestess, political power broker, and the first named author in human history.
In this episode, we trace her rise inside the Akkadian Empire, her exile from the temple, and the radical act of writing herself into history.
This is a story about power, authorship, and what happens when a woman refuses silence. It asks who gets remembered, who gets erased, and why her voice still matters thousands of years later.
CITATIONS:

• Enheduanna: Princess, Priestess, Poet, and Mathematician, https://www2.math.uconn.edu/~glaz/My_Articles/EnheduannaPrincessPriestessPoetAndMathematician.MathIntelligencer.2020.pdf
• Temple Hymns Attributed to Enheduanna, https://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/cgi-bin/etcsl.cgi?text=t.4.80.1#
• Princess, Priestess, Poet. How the World’s First Named Author has been erased from History, https://retrospectjournal.com/2025/10/19/princess-priestess-poet-how-the-worlds-first-named-author-has-been-erased-from-history/
• The World’s First Author Was A Woman, Not A Man, https://www.forbes.com/sites/margiegoldsmith/2022/11/01/the-worlds-first-author-was-a-woman-not-a-man/
• En-Ḫedu-Ana: The Birth of Literature Through the Goddess, https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/iraq/article/enheduana-the-birth-of-literature-through-the-goddess/3B1A7705D84B732E39EDFEC6B1233B6F

For centuries, midwives stood at the centre of birth, care, and women’s knowledge of their own bodies. They delivered generations into the world and passing wisdom from woman to woman long before medicine claimed authority over childbirth.

As Europe entered an age of fear and religious control, midwives were accused of crimes that mirrored their expertise, blamed for tragedy, and cast as threats to divine and medical order.

This bonus episode traces how women’s authority over birth was dismantled, how fear replaced trust, and how history rewrote care as crime.

CITATIONS:

• Historians as Demonologists: The Myth of the Midwife-witch, https://academic.oup.com/shm/article-abstract/3/1/1/1689119
• Healers and midwives accused of witchcraft (1563–1736), https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0260691723003209
• The Midwife-Witch on Trial: Historical Fact or Myth?, https://www.cjmrp.com/index.php/cjmrp/article/view/125
• Midwives in Health Sciences as a Sociocultural Phenomenon, https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9502592/
• Midwives and Healers in the European Witch Trials, https://imss.org/2019/12/a-note-from-the-collections-midwives-and-healers-in-the-european-witch-trials/