Witches and Murdering Mothers: Rethinking Gendered Crime in Early Modern Scotland

WOMEN, GENDER, AND CULTURE IN THE EARLY MODERN WORLD

SPEAKER: Michelle Brock, Washington and Lee University

Michelle D. Brock is Associate Professor of History at Washington and Lee University. A scholar or religion, gender, and the supernatural in early modern Scotland, she is the author of Satan and the Scots: The Devil in Post-Reformation Scotland (2016). She is also co-editor of Knowing Demons, Knowing Spirits in the Early Modern Period (2018) and the forthcoming Routledge History of the Devil in the Western Tradition. Additionally, she is co-director of Mapping the Scottish Reformation, a digital prosopography of the Scottish clergy between 1560 and 1689. Her second monograph, Plagues of the heart: Crisis and covenanting in a seventeenth-century Scottish town has just been published by Manchester University Press (2024). 

Currently a Newhouse fellow at Wellesley, Brock is working on her newest book project, tentatively titled "'An Unnatural Woman': Crime, Gender, and Spectacle in Eighteenth-Century Scotland." This project centers on the sensational case of Margaret Dickson, an ordinary fishwife who survived hanging for infanticide in Edinburgh in 1724 and became the subject of an intense national debate about sin and culpability. Using court records and printed news sources, "An Unnatural Woman" investigates how changing ideologies and media cultures on the eve of the Enlightenment produced a moral panic about female crime, sexuality, and choice. This eighteenth-century story of one woman's tragedy turned public spectacle speaks directly to the regulation of pregnant bodies and criminalization of reproductive decisions in our current moment.