Gender and Justice in the Eighteenth-Century Scottish Highlands: Women in the sheriff court of Inverness, 1748-1800

在18世纪的苏格兰，女性以原告、被告和证人的身份出现在法庭上，但与男性相比，我们对她们的待遇和经历知之甚少。这个项目将使因弗内斯的治安法庭记录对研究人员来说更容易获取，然后将分析其中包含的女性形象和声音。它将解释法庭程序和假设对不同地位和角色的女性的阻碍和帮助，从而改变我们对启蒙运动时期苏格兰高地妇女的社会和法律态度的理解——这些问题在我们这个时代仍然是全球性的。该项目将阐明性别史、法律史、高地社会史与启蒙运动之间的联系，从而在此背景下改变我们对性别社会建构的认识，并更广泛地扩展我们对性别社会建构的理解。长期以来，人们普遍认为18世纪的苏格兰高地女性要么是浪漫的异域生物，要么是贫穷无知的土著，这种观点正在被最近的学术研究所推翻，所以我们开始重新理解这一时期高地女性的能事。此外，人们对妇女参与苏格兰启蒙运动以及苏格兰启蒙运动哲学家关于妇女在社会中的性质和地位的讨论越来越感兴趣。法律也是启蒙运动哲学家的主要兴趣，高地社会吸引了理论家和旅行者。因此，这个项目将建立在这一时期和其他时期英国和苏格兰其他地区性别和法律领域的学术工作的基础上，它将加深我们对高地妇女的角色和作用的理解，以及对高地妇女的社会态度。通过整理和编目由苏格兰国家记录局保存的因弗内斯警长法庭记录，学生将使这些记录更容易被学术研究人员和对当地和家族史感兴趣的公众获取，并在档案工作方面获得专业标准的特殊培训。

Women appeared in court in eighteenth-century Scotland as complainants, defendants and witnesses, but we know relatively little about their treatment and experience by comparison with men. This project will make the sheriff court records of Inverness substantially more accessible to researchers, and will then analyse the female presence and voices they contain. It will explain what court processes and assumptions hindered and helped women of different statuses and roles, and so transform our understanding of social and legal attitudes to women in the Scottish Highlands during the Enlightenment-questions still globally current in our own time.The project will illuminate the nexus between gender history, legal history, Highland social history and the Enlightenment, and so transform our knowledge of the social construction of gender in this context and expand our understanding of the social construction of gender more broadly. Long-held popular views of Scottish Highland women in the eighteenth century either as romanticised, exotic creatures or as poverty-stricken, ignorant natives, are being dismantled by recent scholarship, and so we are beginning to recover an understanding of women's agency in the Highlands in this period. Further, there has been increasing interest in both the participation of women in the Scottish Enlightenment and of the discussion by Scottish Enlightenment philosophers of the nature and place of women in society. The law was also a major interest of Enlightenment philosophers, and Highland society fascinated both theorists and travellers. This project will therefore build on the work of scholarship in the field of gender and law in this period and others, for other regions of Britain and Scotland, and it will deepen our understanding of the roles and agency of Highland women, and of social attitudes to women in the Highlands. By sorting and cataloguing the Inverness sheriff court records, which are held by the National Records of Scotland, the student will make these records much more easily accessible to academic researchers and members of the public interested in local and family history, as well as gaining exceptional training in archival work to professional standards.