Historian. An appreciation
Born: January 18, 1942;
Died: December 9, 2015
JENNY Wormald, who died aged 73 on 9 December, was the most original Scottish historian of the last century, giving the subject an international profile in a way that would previously have been regarded as inherently impossible.
In her work on the Scottish nobility, begun as a Ph.D thesis in the 1960s, and culminating in Lords and Men in Scotland: Bonds of Manrent 1442–1603 (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1985), she was the first to show that the most distinctive aspects of Scottish history are intrinsically its most powerful in addressing wider historical issues.
The task of collecting and calendaring all the 800-odd examples that survive of this unique genre of documents – a particular type of written agreement whereby lesser nobles bound themselves to serve greater nobles in return for improved security – would have been a significant achievement in its own right.
Wormald’s genius was to see the potential of this material to speak to wider historical concerns about the nature of political culture and society before the emergence of the modern state, and to articulate this in ways which engaged not only with other historians with no knowledge of Scottish history, but with other disciplines, too.
Instead of taking theories or insights from other disciplines or fields of history and using these to find an interpretation of the Scottish material, her work was grounded both on her understanding of the documents themselves and their local contexts, and on her imagination in seeing what this could mean more broadly. She was an inspiration not only in her intellectual vision for Scottish history, but her passion for challenging the unthinking acceptance of the status quo.
At the outset of her career she had to battle against prejudice, being bypassed initially for a lectureship simply because she was a woman. More recently she led the widely supported campaign to obtain from the Scottish Catholic hierarchy a coherent explanation of the decision to divide the Scottish Catholic Archives, taking account of the drawbacks inherent in the scheme.
It is difficult to imagine that there will ever be a brighter light in Scottish history, shining with as much originality, passion and unstoppable intellectual and personal courage.
DAUVIT BROUN
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