Women in the Viking Age exercised substantial authority across political, military, household, and economic domains, both alongside male counterparts and independently. Yet many studies continue to cast them as passive figures, defined primarily as the wives of powerful men rather than leaders in their own right.

In this talk, Shanna Bryman explores how the significant obstacle to this recovery lies in androcentric assumptions in medieval text translations and archaeological interpretations that were shaped largely by late 19th and early to mid-20th century scholarship, which has produced lingering misconceptions about women’s status and roles in Viking Age society.

Bryman will also discuss how, by identifying key leadership markers within Old Norse textual sources and developing an updated archaeological criterion for evaluating burial evidence can demonstrate that recovering women’s leadership requires a fundamental reassessment of how both archaeological and medieval written evidence is interpreted.

About the speaker

Shanna Bryman (she/her) specialises in medieval gender studies and female leadership in the early medieval North Atlantic world. She recently completed her PhD with the Institute for Northern Studies at the University of the Highlands and Islands, where her doctoral thesis, Making Herstory: Evaluating Female Leadership in the Viking Age, examined how women exercised political, military, household, and economic authority across Iceland, Britain and Ireland, Scandinavia, Byzantium, and Kyivan Rus’ in the 8th-11th centuries. She is currently under contract with Oxford University Press for a chapter on female leadership in the upcoming Oxford Handbook of the Viking Age and is in discussions with Brepols Publishers and ARC Humanities Press regarding the monograph of her thesis.

Additional information:

Doors open at 6.45pm.

This event takes place in the main hall of Perth Museum so please note that speaker volume may vary at times. To ensure the best listening experience, ticket holders who may have difficulty hearing are encouraged to take seats in the first two rows.

For any questions around accessibility for this event, please get in touch with Events@culturepk.org.uk