Ashley Douglas on With My Own Hand

Historian and translator Ashley Douglas discusses her discovery of Marie Maitland's secret lesbian love poetry hidden in the sixteenth-century Maitland Quarto. She tells the story of Maitland, who avoided marriage by serving as scribe and secretary to her blind father, an influential judge and poet under Mary, Queen of Scots, and of the clues she left to her authorship in a hostile post-Reformation climate. The talk highlights the strength of the female spirit in sixteenth-century Scotland and extends knowledge of women's lives in the period.