Women's Life Writing in Early Modern Scotland: Writing the Evangelical Self, c. 1670-c. 1730 (review)

The writings of early modern Scotland are receiving an increasing amount of attention as part of the overall shift in focus towards an understanding of the British Isles in the seventeenth century as an affair of 'Three Kingdoms,' and Sarah Dunnigan and others have begun to bring early Scotswomen's work into focus in the last decade or so. However, this set of texts is a very welcome addition to what is still a small corpus, with much work yet to be done.

Women played a vigorous part in the Scottish Reformation, and it is therefore very welcome to find the tradition of women's spiritual autobiography (increasingly well explored for early modern England by writers such as Hilary Hinds and Elaine Hobby) brought to light in Scotland also, given that even a recent book such as Hinds's God's Englishwomen does not so much as have an index entry for Scotland. As an introduction to evangelical Presbyterian modes of thought, this collection is admirable, and the brief 'glossary of evangelical piety' which is included is potentially useful far beyond its immediate context.

One of the attractive features of this volume is that it looks at life beyond the lowland belt: three of its narratives are from the northeast, two from Auldearn (where the Collace sisters were, strangely, contemporaries of the notorious witch Isobel Gowdie), and one from Nairn. However, in a book with this title, it would have been useful to see this inclusive principle carried still further. Mullan states that all the early modern womens' self-writings which survive are Presbyterian, which may very well be true if one defines self-writing exclusively as prose autobiography, but it would still be worth pausing for half a page over whether Scotswomen in other religious traditions employed other modes of self-examination. It was a little surprising to find Marie de l'Incarnation brought up as a comparandum in the introduction, given that the text does not even raise the question of whether Scottish Catholic women engaged in life-writing (which was certainly a feature of English Catholic women's culture). Even if the answer were no, it would be worth saying so - it is worth noting, for example, that some of the verse of the Catholic Sileas Na Ceaphaich/Macdonald c 1660-c 1729) is concerned with her life and religion (see Bàrdachd Shìlis na Ceapaich [1972]). It would also have been worth at least mentioning the existence of autobiographical religious verse by the Aberdonian Quaker poet and preacher Lilias Skene (1626-97), since her writings are currently accessible only in William Walker's The Bards of Bon-Accord (1887) and thus run the risk of being entirely forgotten.

While it is wholly legitimate, and instructive, to collect together the writings of evangelical Presbyterians, and the book as it stands is a long one (due principally to the prolixity of Henrietta Lindsay), the fact that it comes out of an intended project about 'religion in Scotland' and is called Women's Life Writing leaves one feeling that the existence of alternative strands of Scottish religiosity, even if they did not give rise to introspective self-examination of precisely the kind edited here, should have been slightly more visible in the introduction, if only to provide context for what these writers have in common. Overall, the volume gives the curious impression that the religious and cultural history of early modern Scotland is entirely the history of the Kirk, which is very far from being the case.

Regrettably, the book is so poorly produced that one entire gathering fell out in the course of the first read-through. Ashgate are not to be congratulated.