This week, new resident blogger Ebba Strutzenbladh introduces you to her life as a researcher, reveals what song she’s been listening to in anticipation of taking up this role, and hints at some of the topics that will be dealt with by our guest bloggers this coming semester.

I’m Ebba, and as of now, the SGSAH blog is my space.

I’m a third-year PhD student focusing on the history of women and the law in and around Aberdeen in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, supervised by the universities of Aberdeen, Dundee, and Stirling. At the moment, I’m undertaking a SGSAH-funded internship with the Aberdeen City and Aberdeenshire Archives, exploring how to work with the archive’s holdings using immersive storytelling.

When I’m not interning, my life as a researcher is 80% about going through the legal records associated with late medieval North-East Scotland and finding the influential women that shaped this region but have been left out of the history books. As my PhD has progressed these past few years, I’ve found myself less interested in the dramatic political history of late medieval Scotland, but in the ‘everyday’ lives of countesses, ladies, and burgess women. Some of them were mothers facing the threat of losing custody of their children when their husbands died. Others were orphaned heiresses to large landed estates who came of age encountering a long line of ambitious suitors and burning questions of whether they would control their estates themselves upon adulthood or if their future husband would take on a dominant role. Some were simply pissed off at a neighbour who’d borrowed a silver belt from them and refused to give it back. Whether they spent most of their time in town or in the countryside, these women skilfully used the legal system to help themselves and their families, and were far from the unambiguous victims that 19th century historians would make them out to be.

The other 20% of my research life has until now been about working through fits of rage when the legal material that I work with can’t answer all the questions that I have about medieval life. For example, I want to know how Christiana Smith felt when she inherited her brother’s sword, a male-coded object that the smiths of the town insisted should belong to her. I want to know what it was like to be slightly boozy from drinking ale every day (admittedly, it would not be impossible for me to find out). I’m very curious too to know why medieval mothers not always fought for custody of their teenage sons in court (although, having had a teenage brother, I might be able to guess). Lastly, I’m always wanting to know what everyone was wearing, what they were saying, and how they said it, at any given time. With the internship that I’m currently doing, I can finally allow my imagination to run wild and picture historical people not as a historian would, but purely as a storyteller. I’ll save the story of this internship for a future post, but for now I’ll say I’m very much enjoying my life as a researcher.

On a funnier note, in anticipation of taking up the blogger role, I’ve been listening non-stop to The Lonely Island’s parody song ‘Semicolon’ (about the many ways to misuse this piece of punctuation), and particularly to the line explaining what a blogger is:

Then go home and write about it; blogger

‘It’ here indicating whatever difficult experience the blogger might have had that day.

This is not to say that I’ll be constantly narrating the events of my own life on this blog, but I will say, I do tend to go anecdote over analysis. As it happens; I have also been known to over- and misuse the semicolon.

Jokes aside, I’ve got some amazing guest bloggers lined up. Watch this space to learn about one student’s year away from research doing military service, the place of Gaelic in Scottish academia, the experience of removing a supervisor from the supervisory team in the middle of the PhD, and more.

I can’t wait to share these stories with you, and to hear from those of you who have ideas for posts!