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Music for Esther Inglis: August events

The Esther Inglis project has been gathering momentum behind the scenes, with plans now in place for an international colloquium, an online exhibition taking shape, many new digitisations of Esther Inglis’ manuscripts which can soon be shared, and several academic conference papers having brought Esther Inglis’ work to new networks and scholarly audiences.

Title-page to Esther Inglis’ English Octonaries upon the Vanitie and Inconstancie of the World, translated from the French originals by Antoine de la Roche Chandieu. Folger Shakespeare Library, V.a.91

For those who are already in Edinburgh, there are two events relating to Esther Inglis and her manuscripts taking place in August, both with a focus on the music which surrounded Inglis in Jacobean Scotland, and the songs which shaped her calligraphic and artistic practices. Music was an important influence on Esther Inglis’ early construction of herself as a woman artist and writer; in her earliest self-portraits she depicts herself at her writing-desk together with a lute and an open book of music, following the 1567 portrait of the French Huguenot poet, Georgette de Montenay (1540-1581), from which Inglis works.

Self-portrait by Esther Inglis (1599), and engraved portrait of Georgette de Montenay (1567) by Pierre Woeiriot.
Bodleian Library, MS 990

On the 17th August, the beautiful Gothic space of St Vincent’s Chapel will host “Nil Penna Sed Usus: A Quartercentenary Event for Esther Inglis”. This immersive event will have two parts; the first will be a recital by the Sacred Arts Festival Singers, directed by Calum Robertson. The Festival Singers will perform selections from the works of Antoine de Chandieu and Guy du Faur. Chandieu’s Octonaires sur la vanité et inconstance du monde, and du Faur’s Quatrains are works of devotional poetry which Esther Inglis copied frequently into her own calligraphic manuscripts.

Octo XXIV from Antoine de la Roche Chandieu’s Octonaires sur la vanite et inconstance du monde, with facing English translation by Esther Inglis
Folger Shakespeare Library, V.a.91 (1600)

Of her 63 known books, 26 contain copies of these religious verses; either their French originals, or (in three cases) English translations of Chandieu’s Octonaires which Esther Inglis composed herself. Of these 26 mansucripts, 9 are made in Esther Inglis’ floral, illuminated style, embellished with painted botanical imagery and the verses copied in her characteristically wide range of calligraphic scripts. These devotional verses were set to music within Esther Inglis’ lifetime; settings of the Quatrains de Guy du Faur by Paschal de l’Estocart were published in 1582, for example, while Claude le Jeune (1530-1600) composed settings for Chandieu’s Octonaires.

1641 publication of Claude le Jeune’s settings of the Octonaires sur la vanite et inconstance du monde, originally written by Antoine de la Roche Chandieu

Selections of these settings will be performed in St Vincent’s chapel, together with a series of metrical psalms and canticles which would have been sung in the services attended by Esther Inglis and her Scottish and French contemporaries. The second part of this event, taking place in the undercroft of the chapel, will be an introduction to the manuscripts of Esther Inglis, with particular focus on her copies of the verses which have been set to music. The result will be an immersive, multimedia event in which to understand the aural world which surrounds Esther Inglis’ work.

 

The second musical event, on the 30th August, will take place at South Leith Parish Church, a medieval church now 533 years old. This location must be close to where Esther Inglis herself lived; she died at Leith on the 30th August 2024. The event is entitled “In My Maker’s Book”, a line from the Nine Haiku for Esther Inglis written by Gerda Stevenson. These Nine Haiku have now been set to music by Sheena Phillips, and this event will offer the world-premiere performance of this newly-commissioned work, performed by Sally Carr (soprano), Juliette Philogene (piano) and Calum Robertson (clarinet and bass clarinet). Again directed by Calum Robertson, the Sacred Arts Festival Chorus will also perform musical pieces from Esther Inglis’ lifetime, including selections of the metrical Psalms, and further settings of the Octonaires sur la vanitie et inconstance du monde and the Quatrains de Guy du Faur.

For further details of this unique concert, please see the Eventbrite page.

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Call for papers: Esther Inglis in contexts and culture, 19th-20th October 2024

Deadline extended to 30th June 2024.

The University of Edinburgh is delighted to invite proposals for a colloquium on the contexts and cultures surrounding the work of Esther Inglis (c.1570-1624), which will be held at the University of Edinburgh on the 19th and 20th October 2024. Guest speakers will include Dr Georgianna Ziegler (Folger Shakespeare Library) and Dr Jamie Reid Baxter (University of Glasgow)

Esther Inglis (c.1570-1624) is a uniquely important scribe, writer and artist.

Escaping religious persecution in France, she and her family moved briefly to England before settling in Edinburgh during her early childhood; here she acquired the skills in calligraphy, drawing, and embroidery that combined to create the extraordinary manuscript books for which she is still famed. Inglis was highly praised as a scribe in her own day, sometimes called the ‘mistress of the golden pen’, and the regard in which her skills were held allowed her books to play a role in the pursuit of personal, religious and political interests. Inglis’s work is not unfamiliar to both academic and wider audiences today, and she continues to inspire contemporary writers and artists. But much remains to be done to understand the multiple forces and contexts which shaped her activity and her singular place within the culture of her time — from her relationship with Scottish politics, to her experience as a Huguenot refugee.

In the quatercentenary of her death, the University of Edinburgh, with the support of the University of Leiden, is hosting a colloquium on the 19th and 20th October 2024, to bring together researchers working on any aspect of Esther Inglis’s life and work, and on any of the crafts, media and cultural contexts in which she worked.

We welcome proposals for 20 minute papers in any of the following areas of early modern study relevant to Inglis:

Scribal culture and manuscript production in an age of print

The practice of book making

Art and the making and giving of gifts

Craft skills and cultural production

Religious and/or cultural politics in early modern Scotland, France, and England

Women’s writing and women’s authorship

Translation and transmediation

Transnationality and the culture and politics of refuge

Proposals (max 200 words) should be sent to Inglis400@ed.ac.uk by 30th June 2024.

Download this call for papers as a PDF here: Esther Inglis contexts culture 24

This colloquium is part of a project that has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (Grant agreement No. 864635, FEATHERS). Read more about the project here. This colloquium is organised in collaboration with the ongoing “Esther Inglis 2024” project at Edinburgh University Library.

Images copyright Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford, and Folger Shakespeare Library, licensed under CC-BY-NC 4.0; copyright National Library of Scotland, reproduced with permission.