Jenny Wormald


Dr Jennifer "Jenny" Wormald HonFSA Scot was a Scottish historian who studied late medieval and early modern Scotland.

Life

Jennifer was born in Glasgow on 18 January 1942, and was adopted by Margaret and Dr Thomas Tannahill, a general practitioner, and was then known as Jenny Tannahill.
She was educated at Glasgow High School for Girls, and went on to study history at the University of Glasgow, where she completed her Ph.D. Her thesis was on the history of the late medieval Scottish nobility through analysis of a kind of document known as a bond of manrent.
Wormald taught at the University of Glasgow between 1966 and 1985, and then St Hilda's College, University of Oxford, between 1985 and 2005. She held a variety of other posts in this time, including Fellow Librarian and Senior Tutor at St Hilda's.
Her most important research was on bloodfeud in early modern Scotland, particularly in her article "Bloodfeud, Kindred and Government in Early Modern Scotland", which was highly influential. Wormald also produced a study of the reign of Mary, Queen of Scots. She was most recently an Honorary Fellow in Scottish History at the University of Edinburgh. Wormald was elected an Honorary Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland on 30 November 2015.
She died in Edinburgh on 9 December 2015. She is buried in Dean Cemetery on the south side of the main entrance path.

Personal life

In 1963, Jennifer Tannahill married Alfred Lawson Brown. As Brown was a devout Roman Catholic, she converted to Catholicism when they married. They had one son and later divorced. In 1980 she married the historian Patrick Wormald, and together they had two sons. They divorced in 2001.

Select bibliography