They Run with Surprising Swiftness - (Peculiar Bodies) by Peter Radford (Paperback)

About the Book

"This book traces women's competitive running and participation in team sports in Britain throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries"--

Book Synopsis

Women have battled for a place in the male-dominated world of sports throughout the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, overturning obstacles and highlighting the changing position of women in societies around the world. This has become one of the defining stories of our age and the central story of women's sports. They Run with Surprising Swiftness tells a different and much older, forgotten story with many of the same themes.

Sports have never been the sole preserve of men; women athletes have always been there. As this book shows, throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Britain, women of all ages ran, fought, rode, played football, cricket, tennis, and other sports. They competed in tough, head-to-head events that required extraordinary endurance and skill. Though not labeled "athletic" at the time, these women performed feats that in our age would certainly earn that descriptor. They Run with Surprising Swiftness recognizes these remarkable athletes and their achievements and aims to restore them to their rightful place in the long history of women in sport.

Review Quotes

They Run with Surprising Swiftness deserves to be widely recognized as a significant achievement. It documents, for the first time, a great deal of forgotten history of early modern women in sport...Radford's groundbreaking book is poised not only to inspire future scholars; it will also surely prompt more welcome discoveries about previously unnoticed and unheralded women athletes of centuries past.

--Devoney Looser, Early Modern Women

A pioneering book based on original and painstaking scholarship. The sheer weight of the research and its meticulously written details will challenge preconceived popular and academic notions about the role and status of women in early modern British society. The book will not only be of interest to sports historians but will also provide fresh insights for scholars of women's history and early modern history in general. Radford is a leading authority on this subject for this time period. This is a labor of love.

--Neil Carter, De Montfort University, Leicester, author of Cycling and the British: A Modern History

This study by a former Olympic medallist turned sports historian presents an astonishing dimension of the long eighteenth century that even most lifetime scholars of the period have probably never glimpsed. It is an admirable demonstration of how the historically marginalized and then forgotten can be recovered by the patient accumulation of small details, closely scrutinized and carefully interpreted.--Yvonne Noble, The Eighteenth Century Intelligencer

About the Author

Peter Radford is an Olympic medallist and world record holder, Professor at the University of Glasgow and Brunel University, and author of The Celebrated Captain Barclay: Sport, Money and Fame in Regency Britain.