Contesting Reformation: Truth-Telling, the Female Voice, and the Gendering of Political Polemic in Early Modern Scotland

Complaining women overheard in conversation was a trope deployed Renaissance literature to criticize public figures and hold them account. This essay discusses why, with what effect, an anonymous author used female persona known readers of the popular sixteenth-century satirist Robert Sempill order comment on political crisis generated Scotland by demonstrations against imposition Prayer Book 1637 signing 1638 National Covenant. Drawing interdisciplinary studies polemical battle over reputation Mary, Queen Scots, will show how presbyterians appropriated figure lowborn truth-teller propagate partisan narrative about meaning interpretation Scotland’s Reformation.