Participant Info

First Name
Rebecca
Last Name
Mason
Country
United Kingdom
State
Affiliation
Institute of Historical Research, University of London, and University of Glasgow
Website URL
https://www.history.ac.uk/people/rebecca-mason
Keywords
Gender history, early modern history, Scottish history, legal history, economic history
Availability
Media Contact
Additional Contact Information
PhD
PhD

Personal Info

Photo
About Me

Rebecca Mason is a historian of early modern Scotland. Her research explores gender relations, property and law in early modern Scotland. Her research project at the Institute of Historical Research, University of London, is entitled: ‘Married Women, Property and Law in Early Modern Scotland.

Rebecca’s research explores gender relations, property and law in early modern Scotland. She completed her PhD at the University of Glasgow in 2019. Her thesis, undertaken in conjunction with the AHRC network, ‘Women Negotiating the Boundaries of Justice: Britain and Ireland, 1100-1750’, examined married women’s property rights and access to justice in seventeenth-century Glasgow. Her thesis explored the varying agency – from utter subservience to husbands to independent initiators of law suits – of married women under the law in legal contracts and actions that reflected their concerns over property.

As the Economic History Society’s Power Fellow, Rebecca’s primary focus will be on developing a monograph based on her doctoral thesis, broadening both its chronology and scope. Her monograph will explore married women’s interaction with the law when asserting their property rights across Scotland between 1600 and 1707. She will spend the year undertaking further archival research on married women’s access to law in the east coast and Highland region of Scotland, and will investigate how married women presented themselves and asserted their property rights before a wide range of civil law courts across early modern Scotland. Rebecca is also keen to explore whether married women’s access to law and their ability to defend their property rights varied in accordance to jurisdictional boundaries, language, confessional identity, and social status on the lead up to the Act of Union of 1707.

Recent Publications

‘Married women, property and paraphernalia in early modern Scotland,’ in Gender, Law and Economic Well-Being in Europe from the Fifteenth to the Nineteenth Century: North versus South?, ed. Anna Bellavitis and Beatrice Zucca (Routledge, 2018), 200–214.

‘Women, marital status and law: the marital spectrum in seventeenth-century Glasgow’, Journal of British Studies (forthcoming, Autumn 2019)

Media Coverage
Country Focus
Scotland
Expertise by Geography
British Isles, United Kingdom, Western Europe
Expertise by Chronology
17th century
Expertise by Topic
Economic History, Family, Gender, Law