Published on December 23, 2025 (Episode 438)
Introduction
In this episode of Historically Thinking, we begin not with a historian’s voice, but with the voice of a seventeenth-century woman.
Lady Frances Culpeper Berkeley—born in England, twice widowed, and married in 1670 to Sir William Berkeley, governor of Virginia—speaks from the midst of crisis. Jamestown has burned. Nathaniel Bacon’s rebellion has fractured the colony’s political order. Her husband has been recalled to England to answer charges before the Crown. Lady Berkeley, left behind, attempts to make sense of loyalty, loss, honor, and exile.
That voice is brought to life by my second guest, Amy Stallings, a historian and historical interpreter who believes the past is best understood not only through documents, but through embodied experience. Together, we explore Bacon’s Rebellion from an unfamiliar vantage point, the interior world of Lady Frances Berkeley, and the intellectual stakes of historical reenactment itself: what it reveals, what it risks, and what it makes newly visible.
About the Guest
Amy Stallings is a historian and public historian at the Jamestown Rediscovery Foundation, where she researches, writes, and performs historically grounded third- and first-person programs based on primary sources. Her doctoral work examined the ballroom as a political space, and for over two decades she has performed and taught seventeenth-, eighteenth-, and nineteenth-century dance. She creates walking tours and interpretive programs focused on women’s lives in early Virginia and brings to life figures ranging from tobacco brides to colonial horticulturalists—including Lady Frances Berkeley. Stallings designs and sews her own period costumes as part of her interpretive practice. She also teaches at the College of William & Mary and is an accomplished vocalist and actor.
For Further Investigation
Frances Culpeper Stephens Berkeley (1634–ca. 1695), Encyclopedia Virginia
Warren M. Billings, Sir William Berkeley and the Forging of Colonial Virginia (LSU Press, 2010)
James Horn, Adapting to a New World: English Society in the Seventeenth-Century Chesapeake (University of North Carolina Press, 1996)
Rhys Isaac, The Transformation of Virginia, 1740–1790 (University of North Carolina Press, 1999)
James D. Rice, Tales from a Revolution: Bacon’s Rebellion and the Transformation of Early America (Oxford University Press, 2012)
Listen & Discuss
Does encountering Bacon’s Rebellion through Lady Frances Berkeley’s voice give you a different understanding of the event than you would have from a text or lecture? How?
What does this episode reveal about loyalty—to people, institutions, and political systems—during moments of upheaval?
What kinds of historical knowledge does first-person interpretation recover that traditional scholarship often struggles to convey?
Where should historians draw the line between interpretation and speculation?
How do material constraints—dress, movement, space—shape political and social behavior?
Tags: Lady Frances Berkeley, Sir William Berkeley, History of Virginia, Amy Stallings, Historical Interpretation, Material Culture
