Women, poetry and song in eighteenth-century Lowland Scotland

Abstract

An important aspect of eighteenth-century Scottish culture was its transitional, interactive nature in relation to oral and written forms in literature and music. Its song culture, in which women played a primary role, is of particular significance. Scottish academic studies of the period, however, are still to a large extent male oriented in their focus and word and print based. This article seeks to draw attention to the marginalisation of both the song culture and the women of the period through a discussion of poetry and song transmission by a representative selection of women in eighteenth-century Lowland Scotland. It argues that “listening to the women” in poetry and song not only means bringing back into the eighteenth-century world picture the place of song alongside Enlightenment philosophy, historical studies and the printed poetic forms of Ramsay, Fergusson and Burns. It also means bringing what Virginia Woolf called “women's values” into our understanding of this important historical period.