Rediscovering the Voices of ‘fanatick wives’: The Cultural Authority of Covenanting Women in Restoration Scotland

Abstract

Laura Stewart’s Rethinking the Scottish Revolution frequently noted the important role played by women in shaping, driving, and sustaining the covenanting revolution of 1638–1651, and established new ground for examining female involvement in its political, ideological, and cultural legacies. Indeed, following the 1660 Restoration, Scottish politicians charged with managing public order would bemoan the dominant influence of ‘fanatick wives’ and ‘silly women’ over those around them and lament their leadership in public petitions, rabblings, and other forms of protest. With few notable exceptions, however, scholarship concentrating on this later period has often paid only limited attention to female nonconformity; noting women’s presence as tolerated wives or spiritual correspondents of male leaders without appreciation of their independent participation and leadership. Purposefully written out of – or sanctified – by many of the canonic sources relied upon by historians of the era and left unnamed in edited primary sources, secondary literature frequently depicts female activists as detached from male counterparts yet united by the prescribed piety and gendered expectations of past and present scholars alike. This article will use new archival evidence and revisit edited sources to rediscover the authoritative voices of female covenanters between 1637 and 1715. Moving discussion beyond ‘agency’ as a satisfactory explanation for female participation in conventicles and other expressions of dissent, it will conclude that these women’s cultural authority must be appreciated and integrated within future scholarship if we are to fully appreciate the true legacies of the covenanting revolution as a major, paradigmatic moment in Scottish History.