Scottish Women Letter-Writers 1480-1625

'The following 14 letters are from the same lady [...] but none of them contain matters of any importance' [NRS, GD40/2/1] This twentieth century assessment of surviving collections of early modern women's letters in Scottish collections continues to shape scholarship. These gendered interpretations have obscured the extent of the survival of women's letters and the evidence they offer for women's economic, intellectual and socio-political power in early modern Scotland. Scholarship of Scottish letter-writing cultures has concentrated on later periods, for example the eighteenth century medical consultation letters of William Cullen or the nineteenth century correspondence of Jane Welsh Carlyle. For the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, there remains a focus on royal and elite correspondents. The example above is symptomatic of two persistent presumed obstacles to research on Scottish women's correspondence in the early modern period: 1. Scottish women's letters do not survive in any meaningful numbers 2. Those that do survive are understood using gendered stereotypes This project challenges both and makes a timely contribution to knowledge of women’s power and agency in early modern Scotland. It is the first comprehensive analysis of women's letters in Scots, English, French and Latin, between 1480 and 1625. Using an innovative digital methodology, it will produce the first multilingual edition of early modern women's letters, crossing social rank, and drawing together several hundred writers. The PI has already completed a preliminary census of British public archives and private collections, collating 1515 unpublished manuscript letters to and from non-royal women. By producing an Open Access database and digital edition of these letters, the project will make the sources accessible to a broad audience of students and scholars across disciplines, as well as the wider public. It expands recent research undertaken to recover Scottish women's lived experience and agency using official and legal sources, including wills, marriage contracts, property transactions, and kirk records. The letters deconstruct understandings of the domestic arena, revealing how women’s epistolary networks crossed local, national and international boundaries. Furthermore, women’s mobility between Lowland Scotland and the Gàidhealtachd, Ireland, England, and continental Europe is evidenced by senders and recipients’ locations, and writers’ multilingual literacies. This multilingual corpus and the evidence it offers for women's networks embeds Scotland within British and European epistolary cultures. Letters are recognised as key sources of women’s history and scholarship of early modern women’s epistolary networks and textual production has flourished in the past thirty years. Studies of English women letter-writers has produced detailed micro-histories in the form of editions of individuals’ correspondence and broader macro-thematic analyses which situate English women within European intellectual and social cultures. Similar recovery of Irish women’s letters in the early modern period through innovative archival and devolutionary methodologies, has challenged colonial assumptions of Ireland as marginal to socio-cultural literacies. Early modern Scottish women’s letters have not benefited from the same level of critical analysis. This database and digital edition will challenge this oversight and offer new evidence for women's letter-writing practices in early modern Scotland.