Contesting Reformation: Truth-Telling, the Female Voice, and the Gendering of Political Polemic in Early Modern Scotland

Complaining women overheard in conversation was a trope deployed in Renaissance literature to criticize public figures and hold them to account. This essay discusses why, and with what effect, an anonymous author used a female persona known to readers of the popular sixteenth-century satirist Robert Sempill in order to comment on the political crisis generated in Scotland by demonstrations against the imposition of the Prayer Book in 1637 and the signing of the 1638 National Covenant. Drawing on interdisciplinary studies of the polemical battle over the reputation of Mary, Queen of Scots, the essay will show how presbyterians appropriated the figure of the lowborn female truth-teller to propagate a partisan narrative about the meaning and interpretation of Scotland’s Reformation.