Elite women and power in Late Medieval Scotland, 1296 to 1458.
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Date
30/11/2020Item status
Restricted AccessEmbargo end date
10/10/2025Author
Davis, Rachel Meredith
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Abstract
This thesis is a case study of elite women in late medieval Scotland, which contributes to the
ongoing re-assessment of women and power in medieval Europe called the ‘Beyond
Exceptionalism’ movement. The debate around women and power has been recurrent within the
discipline of women’s and gender history since the McNamara-Wemple thesis of 1973, which
posited a decline in women’s access to power from c.1050. While aspects of their thesis have
been dismantled, the paradigm it created has had a lasting effect on the absorption and inclusion
of women into master narratives of medieval history. Women that exercised power after the
eleventh century continue to be classified as ‘exceptional’ even if the number of women who
ruled within medieval north-western Europe during the subsequent centuries suggests their
participation to be regular and routine. However, women’s and gender historians have still
argued that a decline in women’s status did occur, shifting it to the fourteenth-century. Within
the field of medieval Scottish history, the analytical prejudice of women’s ‘exceptionality’ can
be traced within political narratives of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and systematic
study of elite women’s activities has yet to be done. Drawing on the scholarship of women’s
and gender historians, this thesis explores the ways in which women exercised power in
fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Scotland through a careful analysis of the language of
women’s charters and seals, as well as other sources that illuminate elite women’s authority.
The main inquiry of the thesis is divided into three chapters and uses the female life
course stages – daughter, wife, and widow – as categories of analysis throughout to assess how
women exercised power in Scotland. The first chapter examines women’s power through the
family with an examination of surviving charter evidence. The evidence presented in this
chapter represents the core of the primary source research of this doctoral project. It approaches
the evidence through prosopography and micro-history, uncovering that elite Scottish women’s
use of the categories of ‘daughter’, ‘wife’, and ‘widow’ were politically strategic and earlier
relationships were often called upon later in life in their exercise of power. The second chapter
examines the visual language of women’s seals, and it suggests that women were innovators in
sealing convention in Scotland through their use of heraldry to express their oftentimes complex
relationships to kinship groups. This counters long-held assumptions about medieval women’s
seals and heraldry as being essentially formulaic. The third chapter re-examines instances of
potential coercion experienced by women as daughters, wives, and widows – through analysis
of wardship, land resignations, and imprisonment, which has been used as evidence of elite
women’s vulnerability. Through analysis of the language of a variety of texts, the chapter
suggests that these instances reveal women’s importance, and latent or potential power as
political actors.
This thesis re-interprets the role of elite women in late medieval Scotland from 1296 to
1458. It argues that rather than ‘exceptions’ to a patriarchal rule, elite women’s activities as
female lords were wide-ranging and routine. The findings of this thesis suggest that the study of
elite women and their exercise of power can provide another way of interpreting how diplomacy
was conducted and that historians of Scottish lordship and politics ought to include the aims and
ambitions of elite women as full political actors in order to understand power in late medieval
Scotland. Importantly, the findings challenge the persistent periodization of women’s and
gender history that posits a weakening in women’s power by the later Middle Ages. This thesis
argues that while fourteenth- and fifteenth-century women had to cope with increasingly
bureaucratic structures, characteristic decline cannot be mapped onto women’s roles in politics.
Rather, their actions were comparable with their eleventh-, twelfth-, and thirteenth-century
predecessors in Scotland as well as medieval northwest Europe.