Professor Matthew Steggle, of the Department of English, has identified a piece of writing which appears to belong to Shakespeare’s sister, Joan Shakespeare Hart (1569-1646).  In it she states she is a Catholic; that her patron saint is Saint Winifred; and she intends to die, when the time comes, a good Catholic death. The manuscript was found in the rafters of her house around 1780; seen and transcribed by two early Shakespeare experts; and then lost, but the early Shakespeare experts identified it – misidentified it, as is argued here – as a document belonging to Shakespeare’s father, John.  Since then it has been controversial, since if genuine it would paint John as a suicidally zealous Catholic under the Elizabethan persecutions.  The article uses digital humanities techniques to establish a new date for the document, which shows that it cannot belong to John, and presents evidence that it in fact belonged to Shakespeare’s sister, Joan.  This is particularly interesting as, despite being the sister of the most famous writer in Western history, Joan Shakespeare Hart remains the “Shakespeare’s sister” of Virginia Woolf’s brilliant essay of 1929, someone so erased by gender conventions as to be nearly invisible. In this reidentified document, she might finally be able to speak a little.  The article appears in Shakespeare Quarterly.