The history of women in Wales and Scotland is in a thriving infancy compared to England. This book draws on this work to examine the significance of contrasting social, economic and religious conditions in shaping the lives of women in Britain. Although gender assumptions were broadly similar, female experience varied. Changes in clanship and inheritance, the employment of single women, the punishment of pregnant brides and scolds, the introduction of Protestantism, and the fusion of fairy beliefs with ideas of demonological witchcraft all contributed to the diversity of women's lives in...

Offering a new interpretation of the transition from Catholicism to Protestantism in the English Reformation, this book explores its implications for an understanding of women and gender. It asserts that late medieval Christocentric piety shaped the nature of the Reformation, and reasseses assumptions that the "loss" of the Virgin Mary and the saints was detrimental to women. In defining the representative frail Christian as a woman devoted to Christ, the Reformation could not be an alien environment for women, while the Christocentric tradition encouraged the questioning of gender...