The Rights of the Dead: Women and Wills in Early Modern Scotland

add to outlook add to google calendar remind me

Friday, October 19th, 2018
10:00 AM to 11:30 AM

For Dr. Cathryn Spence, sixteenth-century wills are a deadly serious business. But they are not just legal documents. They also offer rich insights into the everyday world of ordinary people who lived in days gone by. “The importance of making a will in modern society – with its investments, properties, and consumer culture – is clear,” says Spence, “but making a will was no less important in the early modern period.” She notes, too, that “when the majority of people owned relatively few possessions, the importance of those items cannot be overstated.”

In her talk entitled "The Rights of the Dead: Women and Wills in Early Modern Scotland," Dr. Spence will look at the wills written by single women (widows, servants, and never-married women), as well as the will-making practices of wives. Testament-writing was theoretically open to all members of society in early modern Scotland, but a married woman still required her husband’s consent to write a will. This raises a number of questions, and in the presentation Spence considers the proportion of surviving sixteenth-century Scottish wills that were written by women (and by wives in particular), as well as how the practice of will-making was affected by whether one was a man or a woman. She also looks at the significance of marital status in influencing a woman’s ability to write a will.

Says Spence, “married women in Scotland continued to make wills in great numbers through the sixteenth century and beyond.” This is good fortune for modern historians, and careful examination and analysis of these testaments does much to illuminate what these women actually did some 500 years ago. How these women chose to distribute their worldly goods, and the exhortations and rebukes that accompanied their bequests, provide a window into everyday life in the sixteenth century. The wills also allow insights into the economic activities these women engaged in during their lives. For historians, they also broaden understandings of relations between men and women in the early modern period, and they expose the nature of family ties.

“Ultimately,” says Spence, “the information contained in these wills gives a lively voice to the departed as they articulate long-overlooked details of the lives, relationships, and emotions of these women.”

Dr. Spence has a Ph.D. from the University of Edinburgh and an MA from the University of Guelph. She is the author of Women, Credit, and Debt in Early Modern Scottish Towns (published in the Gender and History series of Manchester University Press in 2016), which won the Women's History Network Book Prize for 2017. She is co-editor of the Edinburgh Housemaills Taxation Book, 1634-6 (Boydell, 2014). She has also written several chapters and articles that explore the intersecting topics of Scottish women, credit and debt, and work. Her research interests include urban and economic history, and the impact of gender and socioeconomic status when navigating economic relationships in early modern Western Europe. At VIU she teaches courses on world history, medieval and early modern history, women’s and gender history, and death.

On October 19 you are encouraged to come early for coffee, cookies, and conversation in the theatre foyer.

Some courtesy parking for this presentation will be available. Enter through Gate 5D (access from Fifth Street) and park in the lot to the right. From 9:00 to 10:00 am, a student in a safety vest will be near the entrance to guide you and provide you with a pass for your dashboard.