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Release : 2005
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Book Synopsis Women and Debt Litigation in Seventeenth-century Scotland by :

Download or read book Women and Debt Litigation in Seventeenth-century Scotland written by . This book was released on 2005. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Many scholars suggest that credit networks were fundamental to the operation of early modern towns. Unfortunately, the majority of this scholarship ignores the role of women in the debt and credit system. The legal position of early modern women and the nature of the available sources mean that womens experiences are generally not documented in any significant numbers. Historians are therefore forced to speculate on how women might have been involved in borrowing and lending and often end up writing as though the female experience of credit was identical to mens experience of the system. The records of the Baillie Court of Aberdeen, Scotland offer a glimpse at women engaging in debt and credit transactions in large numbers and pursuing transactions that went awry. This study looks at 671 debt cases brought before Aberdeens court system in two years in the late seventeenth-century and reveals that women participated in 46% of these cases. Similar studies, focusing mainly on England, have found female participation in debt and credit to hover closer to the 15% range. While there are some unique characteristics that might explain how Aberdeen would see more women becoming involved in the court system, there is little evidence that Aberdonian women were unusually active in the debt and credit system as a whole, in comparison to the rest of early modern Europe. Instead, Aberdeens court records reveal what was likely a very common, but undocumented, experience in the rest of the pre-industrial world. As a result of this unprecedented level of documentation, we see women involved who would otherwise be invisible to us. The Baillie Court shows married women involved in far greater numbers than either single women or widows, a fact which goes against the traditional image of single and widowed women as the only ones involved in the credit system through their roles as moneylenders. Instead, we find another level of women using debt and credit to secure goods for their househ.