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…
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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,…
RTI (Reflectance Transformation Imaging) Workshop 2 – hidden features brought into the light
At a workshop back in April I applied RTI (Reflectance Transformation Imaging) to the processing of images of a twelfth-century parchment leaf and found some details that were difficult to observe with the naked eye.…
The St Andrew manuscript ‘cutting’ and reflectance transformation imaging (RTI)
As light glimmers over the fifteenth-century illuminated initial, the calm and focused expression on the face of our university’s eponym St Andrew remains unchanged. He seems to look directly at the shadow of a…
The Queen’s Platinum Jubilee 2022
Queen Elizabeth II is the first British Monarch to celebrate 70 years of service. Her reign is already longer than the reigns of her four predecessors put together. To mark the Platinum Jubilee weekend, we thought we…
Folger Symposium – ‘Reading Scotland before 1707’
On the weekend of 6-8 May the University hosted a Folger Symposium on ‘Reading Scotland before 1707’. This was the culmination of four years of preparation by Professor Margaret Connolly and Professor Rhiannon Purdie,…
Anatomy of an enquiry, part 2: historical firsts
This is the second part of a blog series about Special Collections’ remote enquiry service, and the types of questions we answer using collections material. Enquiries about historical alumni are one of the most popular…