Product details
- ISBN 9781032492124
- Weight: 440g
- Dimensions: 156 x 234mm
- Publication Date: 10 Mar 2025
- Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Hardback
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Edinburgh's Unruly Women examines experiences of church discipline across parish communities through Edinburgh and its environs. The book argues that experiences of discipline were not universal, varying according to any number of factors such as age, gender, marital status, and social rank.
Adopting a case study approach, the book illuminates the voices of ordinary women as they appeared before their local kirk session (church court) where they navigated the church court system to settle neighbourly disputes, negotiate marriage contracts, or free their husbands from allegations of adultery. Edinburgh's Unruly Women argues that in the context of a deeply patriarchal society, experiences of discipline could not have been universal, but that in creating this strict culture of self-monitoring, the Church created opportunities for women to express power over one another, and indeed, over their male contemporaries.
By placing female parishioners at the heart of the book, filled with individual case studies, Edinburgh's Unruly Women appeals to students and scholars of early modern women, religion, and gender more broadly, and to those with more specialist interest in both ecclesiastical discipline and the history of early modern Scotland in the localities.
Claire McNulty is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow on a Manuscripts for Medieval Studies Project at the Library of Trinity College Dublin, supported by Carnegie Corporation of New York. Claire is interested in the lived female experience of church discipline across early modern Edinburgh, Scotland, and beyond, and its intersection with ideas on gender, sexuality, and power. She has published an article on ‘A Case of Adultery in Trinity College, Edinburgh, 1638’ (2023) and ‘“Gryt Abuse is Found in this Toune”: James Sharpe in South Leith, 1639-1645’ in Chris R. Langley et al. (eds), The Clergy in Early Modern Scotland (2021). She has convened research-led modules on 'Women, Sex, and Power in Early Modern Europe' and 'Witch-hunting from Early Modernity to the Present Day' at Queen's University Belfast (2022; 2021) where she also completed her doctoral research.
