Across centuries, women’s refusal to conform has been staged as spectacle: ducking stools plunging so-called scolds into rivers, bridles forcing tongues to stillness, racks stretching bodies in the name of faith. These punishments were both acts of law and public performances designed to choreograph female obedience.

 

Wyuen Pyne answers back. A medieval term meaning 'women's punishment', the book blends poetry, prose, herstory, cultural commentary and images, Wyuen Pyne reimagines women whose names survive in fragments, whose stories were bent into allegory or whose defiance was branded as sin. From Lilith, the first to say No, to Scheherazade, who turned storytelling into survival, it gathers saints, mothers, daughters, thinkers, rebels and witnesses across scripture, folklore, courtroom records and myth. But the reckoning doesn’t stop at the past. It cuts into the present, where women’s voices confront new forms of control.