Ashley Douglas on With My Own Hand

Ashley Douglas on With My Own Hand

We welcome historian and translator Ashley Douglas to St Andrews to talk about the life of Marie Maitland, a story of forbidden but enduring love, and the strength of the female spirit in a world dominated by men.

The youngest of the Maitland siblings, Marie had watched her elder sisters be married off one by one, destined to take up the unavoidable path for women in sixteenth-century Scotland. However, as she neared marrying age, her father, an influential judge, poet and Keeper of the Privy Seal under Mary, Queen of Scots, went blind and suddenly needed someone to act as his scribe and secretary. In taking up this role, Marie indeed avoided the unavoidable, dedicating her life to her father's work. After his death, she put the finishing touches on the Maitland Quarto, long recognised as significant for its preservation of the poetry of the male great-and-good of sixteenth-century Scotland.

For hidden in the pages of the Maitland Quarto, historian and translator Ashley Douglas discovered Marie's own secret lesbian love poetry. Penning such poetry in the hostile climate of post-Reformation Scotland, with its suffocating tightening of moral control over society, was an incredible act of bravery. Unable to sign it directly, Marie, insistent on her voice and love being known, littered the manuscript with clues to its true penmanship. Clues that, until now, have remained unseen.

A really thrilling discovery - a sixteenth-century woman writing, and she's a professional clerk, and she's a poet, and she's writing love letters to another woman and she's Scots. This is a real extension of our knowledge of women of the period, engagingly told -- Philippa Gregory

Ashley Douglas is a Scottish historian and translator. She has two master's degrees, including an MLitt in Scottish History from the University of St Andrews. Since graduating in 2016, Ashley has developed a national profile and successful career as a translator, historian, and consultant, specialising in LGBT history and the Scots language. She has worked with a range of national heritage, literary and educational organisations, including the National Library of Scotland, Historic Environment Scotland, Time for Inclusive Education, and Scottish National Galleries. She has also been engaged as historical consultant for two of the plays in Rona Munro's acclaimed The James Plays series.