History: Post-Doc Cathryn Spence on Married Women in Medieval Scottish Courts

History post-doc Cathryn Spence has been studying the Scottish burgh records (essentially town records) from 1560 to the mid-1600s with a focus on court cases involving debt and credit. She found that about one-third of the cases involved married women, sometimes with their husbands, but sometimes on their own. “I think that shows us that at any time in history, people’s lives are not as cut and dried as the laws might suggest,” says Spence. “Life is a bit more complicated.”
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