Prof. Ruth Perry

All of Perry's work lately has been about eighteenth-century Scotland and the family of Anna Gordon, later Mrs. Brown, an eighteenth-century Scotswoman who was the first individual ballad-source whose repertoire was deliberately sought out and recorded by collectors. She is calling the book-in-progress A Biography of Anna Gordon (1747-1810): Singer of Tales. Her story is about a woman growing up at the center of the Scottish enlightenment, for her father, who educated her, was a professor at King’s college in Aberdeen. Perry hopes to place her history in its cultural and historical contexts.

In addition to literary analyses of her magnificent ballads, the biography will offer fresh perspectives on the preoccupations of the intellectuals of the Scottish Enlightenment–their interest in oral culture, song, Scotland’s past, and the place of “tradition” in developing concepts of national identity. Perry hopes to shed new light on the question of the contribution of the elite to traditional culture and on women’s privileged status as bearers of the collective cultural inheritance.