Professor Cordelia Beattie (BA, MA, DPhil, FRHistS)

Professor of Women's and Gender History; Medieval and Early Modern Britain

Biography

Background

I studied medieval and modern history at the University of Birmingham, which is where I developed an abiding interest in medieval social history. My particular research interest in medieval women led me to the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of York, where I obtained an MA and a DPhil in Medieval Studies. I was appointed Lecturer in Medieval History at Edinburgh, then promoted to Senior Lecturer and now Professor of Women's and Gender History. I was the founding director of the cross-College Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. I am currently PI on an AHRC-funded project, 'Alice Thornton's Books: Remembrances of a Woman's Life in the Seventeenth Century'.

External appointments

I am the medieval editor for Manchester University Press’s Gender in History series and I am on the editorial board of Women’s History Review.

Useful Links

For the 'Alice Thornton's Books' project:

https://thornton.kdl.kcl.ac.uk

My academia.edu page: https://edinburgh.academia.edu/CordeliaBeattie

Responsibilities & affiliations

PI on AHRC-funded project, 'Alice Thornton's Books: Remembrances of a Woman's Life in the Seventeenth Century'

Centre for Medieval & Renaissance Studies

Undergraduate teaching

  • Women in England, 1300-1700 (4MA)
  • Gender and Society: Men and Women in the Middle Ages, 1000-1500 (Option)
  • Making and Breaking of Medieval Britain and Ireland

Postgraduate teaching

  • Sources of Medieval History
  • Studying Women in Late Medieval England: Sources and Approaches

Open to PhD supervision enquiries?

Yes

Past PhD students supervised

Spence, Cathryn - PhD - 'To Content and Pay': Women's Economic Roles in Edinburgh, Haddington and Linlithgow, 1560-1640 - Primary - 2010

Zimmermann, Yvonne - MScR - Secondary - 2007

Weiss, Jessica - MScR - Secondary - 2004

Talbott, Kara - MScR - Women and Crime in Early Modern England - Primary - 2004

Research summary

Places: 

  • Britain & Ireland
  • Europe

Themes: 

  • Language & Literature

Periods: 

  • Medieval
  • Early Modern

 

My research interests broadly lie in the history of women and gender in pre-modern Britain and Ireland, especially in relation to marriage and the law.

Current research interests

In 2018/19 I traced two missing manuscripts by Alice Wandesford Thornton (1626-1707) - daughter of Christopher Wandesford, a short-lived Deputy of Ireland and wife of William Thornton, a member of the Yorkshire gentry - who wrote four manuscript books of her life. I am now, as PI of an AHRC-funded project, working towards a digital edition of Thornton's four extant books as well as other linked publications.

Knowledge exchange

In 2014, Dr Cathryn Spence and I signed a three-year partnership agreement with the National Records of Scotland. Information from our research on sixteenth-century Scottish testaments has been used to correct the NRS's internal index system and the ScotlandsPeople site.

My discovery of and research into the lost manuscripts of Alice Thornton  was the topic of an event at the Being Human Festival 2019. Dr Debbie Cannon wrote and performed a play, ‘The Remarkable Deliverances of Alice Thornton’, at the Scottish Storytelling Centre. I also discussed this on Radio 3's Free Thinking programme. The current AHRC-funded project on 'Alice Thornton's Books' has a public engagement strand. For example, we were on the English Heritage podcast talking about Alice Thornton and Middleham Castle, which now has an interpretation board which features her: https://soundcloud.com/englishheritage/episode-173-civil-war-and-childbirth-alice-thornton-and-middleham-castle

Project activity

I am currently PI on an AHRC-funded project, 'Alice Thornton's Books: Remembrances of a Woman's Life in the Seventeenth Century' (2021-24). See https://thornton.kdl.kcl.ac.uk

The list below is a subset of the information held on the University of Edinburgh PURE system, and includes Books, Chapters, Articles and Conference contributions. For a full list, including details of other publication types (e.g. reviews), please see the Edinburgh Research Explorer page for Professor Cordelia Beattie.

Books - Authored

Beattie, C. (2007) Medieval Single Women: The Politics of Social Classification in Late Medieval England. Oxford: Oxford University Press

Books - Edited

Beattie, C. (ed.) (2017) Women in the Medieval World. Abingdon & New York: Routledge

Beattie, C. and Stevens, M. (eds.) (2013) Married Women and the Law in Premodern Northwest Europe. Boydell Press

Beattie, C. and Fenton, K. (eds.) (2010) Intersections of Gender, Religion and Ethnicity in the Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan

Beattie, C., Beattie, C., Maslakovic, A. and Jones, S. (eds.) (2003) The Medieval Household in Christian Europe, c. 850-1550: Managing Power, Wealth and the Body. Brepols Publishers

Articles

Beattie, C. (2023) Married women, testaments and property in sixteenth-century Scotland. The Scottish Historical Review, 102(1), pp. 1-33DOI: https://doi.org/10.3366/shr.2023.0587

Beattie, C. (2019) A piece of the puzzle: Women and the law as viewed from the late medieval court of Chancery. Journal of British Studies, 58(4), pp. 751-767DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/jbr.2019.87

Beattie, C. (2019) The discovery of two missing Alice Thornton manuscripts. Notes & Queries, 66(4), pp. 547-553DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/notesj/gjz116

Beattie, C. (2019) Married women's wills: Probate, property and piety in Later Medieval England. Law and History Review, 37(1), pp. 29-60DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0738248018000652

Beattie, C. (2017) Servantes, femmes et veuves: Lire le genre dans les suppliques féminines à la cour de la chancellerie anglaise à la fin du Moyen Age. Cahiers électroniques d’histoire textuelle du LAMOP, 8, pp. 1-28

Beattie, C. (2008) "Living as a single person". Marital Status, Performance and the Law in Late Medieval England. Women's History Review, 17(3), pp. 327-40DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/09612020801924381

Beattie, C. (2006) The Later Medieval English Urban Household. History Compass, 5(1), pp. 112-58DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1478-0542.2006.00364.x

Chapters

Beattie, C. (2021) Choosing Chancery?: Women’s petitions to the late medieval court of Chancery. In: Phipps, T. and Youngs, D. (eds.) Litigating Women: Gender and Justice in Europe c.1200-c.1750. London: Routledge, pp. 99-115DOI: https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429278037-7

Beattie, C. (2021) Uncovering the femme couverte: Married women and the law in late medieval English towns. In: Solórzano Telechea, J., Haemers, J. and Liddy, C. (eds.) La familia urbana: Matrimonio, parentesco y linaje en la Edad Media. Instituto de Estudios Riojanos, pp. 209-30

Beattie, C. (2017) General introduction. In: Beattie, C. (ed.) Women in the medieval world. Routledge, pp. 1-29

Beattie, C. (2013) Your oratrice: Women's petitions to the late medieval court of Chancery. In: Kane, B. and Williamson, F. (eds.) Women, Agency and the Law, 1300–1700. Pickering & Chatto, pp. 17-30

Beattie, C. (2013) Your oratrice: Women’s petitions to the late medieval court of chancery. In: Kane, B. and Williamson, F. (eds.) Women, Agency and the Law, 1300-1700. London: Routledge, pp. 17-29DOI: https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315654751-2

Beattie, C. and Stevens, M. (2013) Introduction: Uncovering married women. In: Beattie, C. and Stevens, M. (eds.) Married Women and the Law in Premodern Northwest Europe. Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, pp. 1-10

Beattie, C. (2013) Married Women, Contracts and Coverture in Late Medieval England. In: Married Women and the Law in Premodern Northwest Europe. Boydell and Brewer

Beattie, C. (2013) The Life Cycle: The Ages of Medieval Women. In: Phillips, K. (ed.) A Cultural History of Women: In the Middle Ages. Bloomsbury Academic, pp. 15-38

Beattie, C. (2010) Introduction: Gender, Power and Difference. In: Beattie, C. and Fenton, K. (eds.) Intersections of Gender, Religion and Ethnicity in the Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 1-11

Beattie, C. (2010) Economy. In: Cavallo, S. and Evangelisti, S. (eds.) A Cultural History of Childhood and Family in the Early Modern Age. Berg, pp. 49-67

Beattie, C. (2006) Single Women, Work and Family: The Chancery Dispute of Jane Wynde and Margaret Clerk. In: Goodich, M. (ed.) Voices from the Bench: The Narratives of Lesser Folk in Medieval Trials. Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 177-202

Beattie, C. (2005) Gender and Femininity in Medieval England. In: Partner, N. (ed.) Writing Medieval History. Hodder Arnold, pp. 153-70

Beattie, C. (2003) Governing Bodies: Local Courts, Male Householders and Single Women in Late Medieval England. In: Beattie, C., Maslakovic, A. and Jones, S. (eds.) The Medieval Household in Christian Europe, c. 850-1550: Managing Power, Wealth and the Body. Brepols Publishers, pp. 199-220

Beattie, C. (2003) Introduction, Locating the Household: Public, Private, and the Social Construction of Gender and Space. In: Beattie, C., Maslakovic, A. and Jones, S. (eds.) The Medieval Household in Christian Europe, c. 850-1550: Managing Power, Wealth and the Body. Brepols, pp. 1-8

Beattie, C. (2000) A room of one's own? The legal evidence for the residential arrangements of women without husbands in late fourteenth-and early fifteenth centruy York. In: Menuge, N. (ed.) Medieval Women and the Law. Boydell Press, pp. 41-56

Beattie, C. (2000) The problem of women's work identitites in post Black Death England'. In: Bothwell, J., Goldberg, P. and Ormrod, W. (eds.) The Problem of Labour in Fourteenth-century England. York Medieval Press, pp. 1-19

This article was published on