Warning: contains mild plot details for A Discovery of Witches Season 2 Episodes 2 & 3

Alongside the sulky real-life Elizabethan playwrights and gruff spymasters of A Discovery of Witches’ second season shines one leading light: Mary Sidney. Styled the Countess of Pembroke following her 1577 marriage to Henry Herbert, Mary Sidney was a celebrated figure in Tudor society with several published works to her name, and close connections to the royal court of Queen Elizabeth I.

Played in the series by Amanda Hale, Mary Sidney becomes Diana’s ally during her and Matthew’s Elizabethan time-walk. A beneficiary of the fashion for aristocratic women’s education in the mid-sixteenth century, the Countess is Diana’s intellectual equal, and makes a useful companion for the history of science professor. Born in 1561, Mary Sidney would have been around Diana’s age when they meet in 1590. She conducts alchemical experiments with ‘Mistress Roydon’, aids in her search for the Book of Life,...