‘“In her tyme”: Understandings of Time in Seventeenth-Century Scottish Recipe Books’ is an original contribution to historical understanding of life in early modern Scotland, primarily concerned with representations of time and temporality in seventeenth-century Scottish recipe books. It principally draws from the National Library of Scotland’s holding of culinary and medical recipe books, focusing on eight manuscripts written across the seventeenth and into the early-eighteenth centuries. All of the writers it considers were Scottish noblewomen with charge of rural estates of varying sizes. This thesis asks how time was understood by these recipe-book writers. It explores temporal expression from clock time to ‘forever’; analyses the ways in which time was culturally and historically constructed; and specifically relates its findings to the experiences of elite women in early modern Scotland. It is situated within early modern Scottish women’s history, and benefits from interdisciplinary research in the areas of time studies and recipe-book studies.

Exploring representations of time from the minutiae to beyond the lifetime, this thesis makes three key contributions. First, it establishes that time was understood as complex and ‘multi-temporal’. It then argues that the specific representations explored here represent a ‘timescape’ unique to the writers of these texts. These core understandings then draw towards the argument that ‘temporal agency’ was a significant part of the political and cultural influence of elite women in early modern Scotland. Throughout, the importance of studying time and bringing it into conversation with the field of Scottish women’s history, is clear.