ABSTRACT
This chapter is concerned with material things – namely, a woman’s personal items of worth – and her subsequent right to own these items within a marital union in early modern Scotland. Items considered personal to a woman typically included her wearing apparel and her jewellery, which were collectively deemed as forming her ‘paraphernalia’ before the law (Erskine 1773: 90–91). Research exploring a married woman’s ability to own and access her personal items of worth separately from her joint marital estate during the early modern period is surprisingly sparse, with scholarship transiently focusing on her limited right to administer her clothing and jewellery during her marriage; especially when living under the shackles of coverture (Staves 1990: 147–149; Erickson 2005: 26, 90, 122, 145, 184). By contrast, our knowledge of the nature and extent of a wife’s paraphernalia in early modern Scotland remains significantly under-developed (Coutts 2003: 140; Peters 2003: 42–43; Barclay 2011: 46). This chapter will begin to reveal how wives in Scotland legally retained the right to pawn, sell and bequeath their paraphernalia separately from their marital estate in Scotland, with husbands possessing little to no right to own, sell or even administer such moveable assets during and after their marriage.
