Family, Performativity and Justice in Early Modern Scotland: Elite Display and the Death of the Fourth Earl of Atholl, 1579

This article reconstructs the programme of public events led in Scotland over the course of 1579 by the widow and heir of John Stewart, fourth earl of Atholl, in an attempt to secure justice for his alleged death by poisoning. It argues that Margaret Fleming, the earl’s widow, chose a strategy of public performance, petitioning and spectacle to do this. The use of performance in this way is an overlooked means by which justice was sought within the context of Scotland’s endemic culture of kin-based feuding. This offers an additional perspective to established historiography on bloodfeud in Scotland, which has tended to focus on the use of violence as the central tool for resolution and on the private and public legal processes used to mediate feuds. The article also provides a range of important new evidence relating to unscripted and processional performance in early modern Scotland, which highlights cultural continuities with death-rites in the early modern period across Europe.