Sarah Clegg’s Woman’s Lore: 4,000 Years of Sirens, Serpents and Succubi is about ancient demonic figures, expressly the infamous child-killing monsters of the Near East and Mediterranean. Intimately tied to childbirth and infant and child mortality, such monsters were female in form.
Often, they were negatively connected to female sexuality. Chronicled over centuries, monsters such as the Mesopotamian Lamashtu, the Greek Lamia, and the Hebrew (and Mesopotamian) Lilith are, in Clegg’s thesis, a significant part of women’s lore, “a tradition kept alive by women, that tells the story of women’s lives, from 2000 BC to the present day”.
