Cathryn Spence's Women, Credit, and Debt in Early Modern Scotland provides the first book-length investigation of credit and debt in early modern Scotland. Using burgh court records, testaments, and a unique tax roll from 1635, Spence examines women's involvement in lending and borrowing in four towns: Edinburgh, Dundee, and two smaller market towns, Haddington and Linlithgow, in the period 1560–1640. This is a substantial body of evidence: more than 37,000 debts cases from Edinburgh and more than 16,000 collectively from the other three towns. Women's involvement was considerable, with over a third of the Edinburgh cases involving a female creditor, and over a third a female debtor. While the study of money lending in England using probate inventories has stressed the role of widows and singlewomen, Spence's figures show that wives, either acting alone or with their husbands, are the most frequently recorded type of women in the Scottish debt litigation.

After providing an overview of the contours of debt litigation, Spence examines, in turn, women's role as traders of goods, ale producers and retailers, landladies and moneylenders, and various roles of female servants in Scottish towns. As such, despite its title, this is really a book about women's involvement in Scotland's commercial urban economy. The focus on lending and borrowing and the resulting litigation serves as a window in Scotland's economy, showing how different trades functioned and the role of different types of women within them.

A good example is provided by the wine trade, where Spence is able to correct the previous assumption of historians that women were not involved. Overseas traders imported large quantities of wine into Edinburgh's port at Leith. These traders were the merchant elite, mostly men. Women who imported wine were either the wives or widows of merchants. Importers sold large batches of wine to retailers or “merchandisers” (75), many of whom were women, who sold wine from their shops or taverns. At the bottom of the hierarchy were female servants who purchased wine from retailers to sell in small quantities on the street. They were either employed specifically to sell wine in this way or took wine on credit, repaying the wine retailer after it had been sold. This pattern of men dominating the overseas imports while women dominated the retail trade is also found among other trades. In Scotland, “cramers,” or merchandisers bought imported goods to sell in their booths, shops, or market stalls (75). The merchandise was a mixture of types of goods such as cloth, cooking pots, spices, and candy. For the sixteenth century, surviving records suggest that most cramers were men, but by the first half of the seventeenth century it was women who dominated this type of trade, as was the case elsewhere in Europe. Another trade dominated by women was the production and sale of ale. In England, women were squeezed out of commercial production in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century, as ale was replaced by beer, and large-scale production became more widespread. Spence finds that in Scotland women retained their dominant position. Over a third of all debt litigation involving women in Edinburgh and Haddington had some connection to the ale business, and a quarter of the cases in Linlithgow were similarly connected to ale production. A bold move to undermine women's dominance was made with the establishment of the all-male Fellowship and Society of Ale and Beer Brewers in Edinburgh in 1596, which excluded nonmembers (women) from large-scale production and sale. However, this effort proved unsuccessful, and the society was dissolved in 1619.

Spence grounds her observations in the extensive primary documents in the existing literature on women's work and commercial activities across northern Europe. But she leaves a number of larger questions unresolved. On a number of occasions she cites the presence or absence of guilds that restricted membership to men and their widows as an explanation for women's participation in particular trades. The concern of male-only town governments about “unchaste” behavior is cited as a reason for the exclusion of unmarried women from other activities (107). And yet the debt litigation provides ample evidence of women's active, assertive and successful participation in commerce at all levels. How did men manage to exclude women from some trades—and why did they seek to do so? The Society of Ale and Beer Brewers could be seen as a dramatic and, importantly, failed episode in a long-running battle over the gendered nature of commerce in Scotland that requires further investigation and explanation. Nonetheless, we would not be considering these issues at all if Spence had not done the vital groundwork of unearthing and analyzing such a striking body of documentary evidence that shines a new and revealing light onto women's lives in early modern Scotland.