Today is National Poetry Day! I’d like to celebrate this event by showcasing how a poem can act as a link between nations, in this case between Scotland and Germany. In 1802, Walter Scott published his Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (Bk.5/1.3-4), a collection of “historical and romantic ballads, collected in the southern counties of Scotland”, as the subtitle said. […]
Tag: exhibitions
Shakespeare lives on…
Our Shakespeare exhibition has finished, but it still lives on in our Digital Gallery in the form of two different features. Shakespeare Collected allows you to explore the collectors and collections we celebrated in our exhibition, through text, films, and images. You can also follow in the footsteps of the collector James Halliwell-Phillipps and build […]
Shakespeare and the King James Bible
In the famous radio programme Desert Island Discs, castaways are always automatically given the Bible and the complete works of Shakespeare as essentials on their desert island, symbolizing the position the two hold as the twin pillars on which so much of our culture is founded. Until Sunday January 8th, you can see original editions of […]
Shakespeare Exhibition: Beyond Macbeth
Our new exhibition Beyond Macbeth: Shakespeare in Scottish Collections is now open! This exhibition is a collaboration with the University of Edinburgh, showcasing the two libraries’ world-class collections of early editions of Shakespeare’s plays, other early modern drama, and manuscripts relating to the study of Shakespeare. On display are the First Folio, the first […]
500th Anniversary of the Aberdeen Breviary display
After our display marking the anniversary of the Scottish Reformation, we travel back in time half a century for our new Visitor Centre display, to celebrate the completion of the printing of the Aberdeen Breviary in 1510. The Aberdeen Breviary, so called because it was compiled under the direction of William Elphinstone, Bishop of Aberdeen, is […]
The first Scottish printed Bible
Page from the Bassandyne Bible Today is the last day of our Reformation display, and for a final post I would like to write about the first Bible printed in Scotland, generally called the Bassandyne Bible, after its printer Thomas Bassandyne. Bibles certainly circulated in Scotland before the Bassandyne Bible was published – printed editions […]