We are delighted to announce the launch of “Rewriting the Script”: a new online exhibition and research resource celebrating the life and works of Esther Inglis, curated by Anna-Nadine Pike. This exhibition forms one of the major outputs of the “Esther Inglis 2024” project at Edinburgh University Library. It is the result of several years of research and many months of curation, supported by the invaluable assistance of librarians and digital archivists across the globe who have provided new digital imagery of Inglis’ manuscripts to aid in the telling of her remarkable story. The exhibition displays nearly half of Esther Inglis’ known surviving manuscripts, and contains links to all of the currently-available digital imagery of her work. Structured by nine different sections, this exhibition celebrates the diversity of Esther Inglis’ identity — as scribe, artist, author, mother, and as a truly exceptional Jacobean woman.
The exhibition has been titled “Rewriting the Script: the works and words of Esther Inglis” — and the different levels to this name are intentional. As a scribe, Esther Inglis’ work was to write and rewrite the many individual scripts which she learned from her mother and from the publications of contemporary writing masters. She worked in more scripts than anyone else from her time, man or woman, professional or pupil. But through her scribal activity, her artistry, the intricacy of her work and her involvement in wider social or literary circles, she also endlessly rewrote the script for an early-modern woman in Scotland or England — known within the Jacobean court and receiving a level of education unparalleled for a non-aristocratic woman.
A further layer of “rewriting”, which formed part of the process of curating this exhibition, is the rewriting of how Esther Inglis is known to us today. “Rewriting the Script” emphasises that Esther Inglis was not just a calligrapher — she was a scribe, but she was also an artist with the pen and with the needle, she was an illuminator or limner, she was a portrait miniaturist, a literary author. And, woven into all these facets of her identity, she was a wife, a daughter of refugees, and a mother to eight children.
“Rewriting the Script” has been designed as an immersive and interactive online exhibition — alongside the curated images of Inglis’ surviving manuscripts, for example, the exhibition also includes many different audio clips. Listening to the integrated audio, a visitor can hear the ‘voices’ of Esther Inglis and her husband Bartilmo Kello reading from their own manuscripts — as well as longer interview-style pieces with modern scholars, and even the actor Gerda Stevenson reading her own poem, Nine Haiku for Esther Inglis. Adding to its interactivity, the exhibition also incorporates several videos filmed with the National Library of Scotland. These videos facilitate close-up viewing of Inglis’ books while also allowing viewers to deepen their understanding of particular manuscripts. In the example below, the video compares one of Esther Inglis’ manuscripts from 1607 to a Flemish medieval manuscript produced in the early 1500s which then circulated in Scotland, and it explores the connection between their artistic styles.
Another possibility offered by an online exhibition is also the potential for close looking – guiding a
viewer through different parts of a particular image. “Rewriting the Script” includes several interactive images which enable close-up encounters with the items displayed — from Esther Inglis’ own self-portraits to an immersive ‘early modern writing desk’. Scrolls through each page, the curation of images also moves between close-ups, magnification, and books held within the palm of the hand, and this is designed to immerse a viewer in the intricacy of Esther Inglis’ work, while still capturing the miniature nature of many of her books.
The final section of this exhibition considers the afterlives of Esther Inglis’ manuscripts — what has happened to these books in the 400 years since their first creation, from journeys to different libraries, to readers’ additions to their pages, to the beginnings of academic conversations around Inglis and her work. It is the hope of the “Esther Inglis 2024” project that this new online exhibition will allow these conversations to continue — while also moving beyond academic spaces, bringing Esther Inglis’ story and her manuscripts to wider audiences. “Rewriting the Script” has been designed as an engaging exhibition which is aimed at the general public, but grounded within the latest scholarly and archival research.
Visit the exhibition here.
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