PudFest 2024: a feast of flavour
Are you tired of the same old parade of treats on your festive table? Bored stiff by yet another Bûche de Noel? Are you looking to introduce an element of thrill and peril into your party preparations which only a…
Search by category: manuscript collection
New acquisition for Libraries and Museums: the St Andrews Chronicles
One of the most important histories of Scotland, which sheds new light on William Wallace and the Stone of Destiny, has found its permanent home with St Andrews University Libraries and Museums. A newly acquired…
The colour aniline purple – housing silk textiles from the Calvert Chemistry Collection
Bringing in collections Incoming university collections are routinely checked for dirt, mould and insect activity before being cleaned, rehoused and shelved in the stores. Not all collection items come from suitable…
Notarial marks in the St Andrews burgh charters
Scottish History PhD candidate Kate McGregor has been has been working for the past year as a Research Assistant on a project investigating notaries and their networks in late medieval St Andrews, supported by generous…
‘The Usurpers’ by Willa Muir
We recently celebrated the publication of a novel which had waited 70 years to get into print. This is Willa Muir’s ‘new’ novel, The Usurpers. Two typed versions of the manuscript, and a few pages of a handwritten…
Robert Burns Night
People in Scotland, and all around the world, will be cutting into a haggis today or lifting a wee dram to the memory of Robert Burns, our national poet. Like many Scottish libraries, St Andrews has many editions of…
The Yule Days – Day 6 – ‘Three goldspinks’
The king sent his lady on the sixth Yule day, Three goldspinks, three starlings, a goose that was gray, Three plovers, three partridges, a papingo-aye; Wha learns my carol and carries it away? Goldspinks is the Scots…
The Yule Days – Day 1 – ‘A papingo-aye’
The king sent his lady on the first Yule day, A papingo-aye; Wha learns my carol and carries it away? Pippin-go-aye or papingo-aye is a Scots word for parrot, though in Chambers edition of Popular Rhymes, it is…
RTI imaging fragments of ‘The Romances of Kyng Alisander’, strays from the Auchinleck manuscript
Continuing the series of blog posts on the recent RTI (Reflectance Transformation Imaging) workshop, Phoebe MacIndoe looks at the fragments of ‘The Romances of Kyng Alisander’. The advantages to using digitised…
Conjuring the Light and Shadow in the Past: The Reflectance Transformation Imaging (RTI) Workshop
The Reflectance Transformation Imaging (RTI) technique opens up new horizons for the close study of the materiality of palpable objects like manuscripts. It reveals things we cannot easily observe with our very eyes,…