Thursday, 5 December 2024, 18:00-20:00 GMT/BST (online, ZOOM)
Facilitator: Steve Newman, Temple University
SPEAKERS:
Kate Hill, University of Lincoln: The home-made archive: women and DIY museums in twentieth-century Scotland
It is frequently asserted that archives are disciplinary formations, categorising people and controlling knowledge through their professional staff and structures. But what about archives that were not professional, structured or even conceived of as archives? I will discuss the material – documents, images and objects – collected by non-professional women who founded folk museums in Scotland; particularly Isabel Grant of the Highland Folk Museum and Barbara Fairweather of Glencoe Folk Museum. These archives, partial, haphazard and idiosyncratic, speak to the affective, embodied and place-based experiences of the past sought by these modern Scottish women, grounding their own, quite mobile, lives in a sense of rootedness.
Brianna E. Robertson-Kirkland, Royal Conservatoire of Scotland: No Man is an Island: Archival Finds and The Corri Family in Edinburgh
The Italian émigré, Domenico Corri (1746-1825), has long been depicted by musicologists and historians as a leading musical figure and entrepreneurial businessmen following his immigration to Edinburgh in 1771. A key secondary source for musicologists, Oxford Music Online, even states that he was invited to conduct the Edinburgh Musical Society concerts, that he ‘quickly established business enterprises’, and that ‘he started a music publishing business with his brother Natale in the name of his eldest son John (or Giovanni)’.[1] While he had multiple business ventures, recent archival evidence has shown that John was not his son but rather his brother, who worked in collaboration with him to publish Domenico’s first treatise before John (not Domenico) entered into a partnership with James Sutherland to establish the publishing house, Corri and Sutherland. Indeed, such inaccuracies have unfairly elevated Domenico’s status to leading musical figure above any of his other family members. The new archival evidence reveals that it was the family as a whole that worked together to establish the Corri name as respectable performers and publishers in Scotland’s capital.
This presentation will focus on two of Domenico’s family – his wife, Francesca (1750?-1802) and his brother, Giambattista otherwise known as John (1760?-1798), both of whom came with Domenico to Edinburgh in 1771. I will discuss what led to the misinformation surrounding these two figures and show archival evidence that proves they were just as active in Edinburgh’s musical community as Domenico. Such discoveries allow for a more nuanced and accurate understanding of both the Corri family and the professional musical performance and publishing world of eighteenth-century Edinburgh.
Craig Lamont, University of Glasgow: Allan Ramsay: an intensely local archive
The works of Allan Ramsay (1684–1758) are in large part a product of his professional and social life in Edinburgh, where he laid many foundations for the heyday of the Scottish Enlightenment. In this paper, we will see how Ramsay’s archives in Edinburgh have shaped the new Edinburgh Edition of his works (completed in 2024), and the extent to which his writing – in English and in Scots, in poetry and in prose – touches these crucial years of Scotland’s intellectual growth.
Nigel Leask, University of Glasgow, and Peadar Ó Muircheartaigh, University of Edinburgh: The MacNicol Papers: ‘From Lismore to Barbados’ and Beyond
This talk arises out of archival research for the AHRC funded project ‘From Lismore to Barbados’: The Gaelic Caribbean Travel Journal and Poetry of Dugald MacNicol, 1791-1844’. Initial research for the project was conducted remotely during the Covid Lockdown: key archival sources were the MacNicol Papers in the National Library of Scotland; Probate Court records in the National Archive at Kew; Army Lists; Barbados Archives Department (for information on his family life in the Caribbean); University College London’s Legacies of British Slavery Database. We also benefited greatly from contact with Barbadian genealogists during that period of research. Further Barbados archival research remains to be done during a planned research visit in 2025.
In this short talk we will focus on the transnational, colonial history of the MacNicol archive itself. Now preserved in the National Library of Scotland, much of the collection was compiled by Rev Donald MacNicol (1735–1802), but travelled with his sons to both the West, and East Indies during the 19th century where it was added to. The Gaelic folklorist John Francis Campbell, who was given access to the collection by Donald MacNicol’s grandson Ludovic Cameron in 1870, describes how his uncle, Dugald MacNicol ‘had the papers in the West Indies, and made some notes upon them … An elder brother of Dugald, who went to Calcutta and Australia, may have had some of his father’s papers … It is said that one of the family lost a portmanteau in the West Indies by the upsetting of a boat, and that he then lost some of the Gaelic manuscripts’. This talk will explore some of these adventures and misadventures, setting the surviving MacNicol papers in the NLS in dialogue with archives elsewhere.
[1] Peter Ward Jones and Rachel E. Cowgill, “Corri, Domenico,” Grove Music Online, 2001; Accessed 30 Sep. 2024. https://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/grovemusic/view/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.001.0001/omo-9781561592630-e-90000380703.
INTERNATIONAL ASSOCIATION FOR THE STUDY OF SCOTTISH LITERATURES 