Sanderson, Margaret H.B. 1933–

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Sanderson, Margaret H.B. 1933–

PERSONAL:

Born 1933. Education: Earned M.A. and Ph.D.

ADDRESSES:

Home—Scotland.

CAREER:

Writer. Scottish Record Office (now National Archives of Scotland), Edinburgh, Scotland, former head of publications and education.

WRITINGS:

Scottish Rural Society in the Sixteenth Century, J. Donald (Edinburgh, Scotland), 1982.

Cardinal of Scotland, David Beaton, c. 1494-1546, J. Donald (Edinburgh, Scotland), 1986, revised edition, 2001.

Mary Stewart's People: Life in Mary Stewart's Scotland, University of Alabama Press (Tuscaloosa, AL), 1987.

Robert Adam and Scotland: Portrait of an Architect, Her Majesty's Stationery Office (Edinburgh, Scotland), 1992.

Ayrshire and the Reformation: People and Change, 1490-1600, Tuckwell Press (East Linton, Scotland), 1997.

A Kindly Place? Living in Sixteenth-Century Scotland, Tuckwell Press (East Linton, Scotland), 2002.

Also author of The Peoples of Scotland: A Multicultural History.

SIDELIGHTS:

In A Kindly Place? Living in Sixteenth-Century Scotland, Margaret H.B. Sanderson explores the lives of early-modern Scots, including lairds and tenants, merchants and craftsman, and skilled workers such as ploughmen, shepherds, and sawyers. The former head of publications and education at the Scottish Record Office (now the National Archives of Scotland), Sanderson divides her volume into twelve chapters, addressing such topics as housing, land tenure, the role of women, literacy, and religious practices. According to Renaissance Quarterly reviewer Richard D. Culbertson, the author's "extensive experience with public and legal records, private archives, and other primary material, provides the historical background for the consideration of the private life of people in sixteenth-century Scotland." Though David Allen, writing in Albion, expressed some reservations about the work, including its anecdotal style and its focus on evidential material instead of analysis, he concluded that A Kindly Place? "is still a valuable book. It is the product of an uncommon familiarity with a considerable body of largely-untapped historical evidence. It tells us things about many individual sixteenth-century Scots that no other study has done. Above all, it succeeds in showing the reader what some of the most fruitful lines of future inquiry might be." "In the tasks she sets for herself—to illuminate the lives of understudied Scots—Sanderson has succeeded remarkably," observed Historian critic Robert Landrum.