While scholars have written extensively about more respectable (and verifiably real) astrologers and alchemists who mastered the necromantic arts, from John Dee in the sixteenth century to Simon Forman and William Lilly in the seventeenth (the latter an author of a pamphlet about Mother Shipton), the “cunning-woman” of Yorkshire has remained the province of psychics and tarot card readers, hazily remembered as just another antique prophetess. Distinctions between those gentlemen with their grimoires, scrying mirrors, and alchemical tables and the hag of Yorkshire might not be as historically clear as could be assumed. Sharpe explains that a “distinction between witchcraft on the one hand and magic and sorcery on the other proves impossible”, and that “medieval and early modern commentators tended to jumble the terms [of witchcraft and magic] together happily enough.” Certainly there has been a rich and full investigation of witchcraft by social historians over the past half-century, yet Mother Shipton herself awaits her full due -- a debt which may continue to be deferred so long as proof of her existence eludes us. Despite much (or even perhaps all) of her biography and her supposed fortunes being the result of hoax, invention, conjecture, and fiction, there is a cracked truth in her example. For even in her most famed, fake, and falsified predictions we are given the opportunity to contemplate this strange thing of prophecy, in both its propaganda and its poetry, while also perhaps encountering the witch of York on her own terms, seeing predictions for what they are: a weird type of participatory literature.