Impatient Griseldas: Women and the Perpetration of Violence in Sixteenth-Century Glasgow

In her 1986 overview of medieval women’s lives, Margaret Wade Labarge drew attention to women’s verbal assertiveness. Since then, there have been many innovative studies of medieval and early modern women’s ‘disorderly speech,’ studies which have greatly advanced our understanding of premodern gender relations, dynamics of household and community, and gendered expectations of behaviour. However, women made use of their fists as well as their tongues: insults could all too easily lead to blows. Until recently, less attention has been paid to women’s physical assaults on their opponents, perhaps because the ratio of women to men involved in physical violence has historically been lower than that involved in verbal violence. As Garthine Walker has pointed out, the quantification common in historical studies of crime can result in a tendency to ignore women’s experience: “What tends to happen is that women are counted, and being a minority of offenders, are subsequently discounted as unimportant.” Most studies of violence in medieval and early modern Europe have focused on men’s actions, with women appearing primarily as victims of violence rather than as perpetrators. Moreover, examinations of women and crime have tended to focus on actions which have been characterized by modern historians as particularly ‘feminine’: crimes such as infanticide, scolding, and witchcraft.