Public Seminar Series Recording Now Online

Mobility is about more than movement. In the Norse period, as today, it could be a form of agency, power and social capital. Yet, women’s mobility has too often been dismissed as passive, forced and dependent on men. This paper challenges this assumption, by examining how female mobility in the Norse period was enacted and experienced across different spaces, from movement within the home and in the local community, through to long-distance maritime migration and travel.

Women’s movement, whether local or long-distance, was not simply a reflection of geography but of social structures. The ability or inability to be mobile was shaped not just by intersectional factors such as gender, age, status, marital status and ability, but by a person’s membership of and role within dynamic, overlapping and sometimes conflicting social groups.

Of these groups, the household stood at the heart of the system, providing the social, legal, economic and political basis for, and the social conventions that governed, the mobility of women and men. Yet, the people who lived outside of permanent household ties were exposed to the precarious side of mobility, where movement became a threat rather than a form of agency. By placing women at the centre of the analysis, this paper explores how gender, status, household membership, and mobility were deeply entwined, redefining how we understand concepts of gendered mobility, power and belonging in the Norse period.

The full recording can be accessed via the UHI Institute for Northern Studies You Tube Channel