This post was written by Jaycee Streeter, Outreach and Communications Intern for the Esther Inglis Project. Jaycee is a History MSc student at the University, with research interests in early modern Scottish literary and religious history. 

On Saturday, April 26th, St. Cecilia’s Hall in Edinburgh hosted “An Afternoon with Esther Inglis (c. 1570-1624)”, marking the end of the Esther Inglis 2024 Project, coordinated by Anna-Nadine Pike and Jaycee Streeter. The project has been running at Edinburgh University Library for the last eighteen months, marking 400 years since Esther Inglis death through new research, an online exhibition titled “Rewriting the Script”, and a program designed to bring Esther Inglis story to wider audiences in Edinburgh and beyond. That program included concerts, an international colloquium, a physical exhibition in the Centre for Research Collections, and now, a grand finale with this final public event.  

The event aimed to bring Inglis, with her work and context, to the public through a variety of forms—a panel discussion, poetry performance, and musical performance—and a mix of media both contemporary to Inglis and modern but inspired by her.  

The panel featured two Esther Inglis experts, Anna-Nadine Pike and Jamie Reid-Baxter, as well as two acclaimed authors who have featured Inglis in their works, Sara Sheridan and Gerda Stevenson. Their discussion was extensive and varied, touching on Inglis’ context in Edinburgh, how we can better tell the stories of Scottish women in this period, their research processes and how they manage/utilize silence in the archives, and the role we can play in commemorating women today. The audience was able to ask questions of the panel, and were curious to know more about Esther Inglis and her story. 

Then, Gerda Stevenson and Jamie Reid-Baxter brought poetry to life with readings from Inglis’ manuscripts, words written by Inglis herself, and contemporary poetry written praising Inglis and her skills. Reciting in French, English, and Scots, their performance brought the audience closer to Inglis’ life and work.  

This was followed by a modern composition, Gerda Stevenson’s own “Nine Haiku for Esther Inglis” which is featured in her poetry collection, “QUINES: Poems in tribute to women of Scotland.” She discussed her inspiration for the poem and the emotional connection she felt with Inglis, and the other women featured in the collection.  

Then, the White Rose Ensemble took the stage. The Ensemble, founded in 2017 by soprano Sally Carr and clarinetist Calum Robertson, is an Edinburgh-based duo known for their innovative chamber music rooted in Scottish and contemporary traditions. They were joined by pianist Ailsa Aitkenhead. Together, they played psalms featured in Inglis’ manuscripts and two songs written by contemporary Scottish women, showing the audience the music that Inglis would have engaged with in her lifetime.  

The event concluded with a modern composition by Sheena Phillips, set to the text of Gerda Stevenson’s “Nine Haiku for Esther Inglis,” which Phillips describes as, “marvellous vignettes of key aspects of Esther’s life and work, and full of musical possibilities. The musical setting of the haiku deliberately echoes aspects of Esther’s work.”  

This blending of Inglis’ work and work contemporary to her and modern art inspired by it embodies the goal of this event, and in a greater sense, the whole Esther Inglis Project. If the panel posed the question, “How can we commemorate women like Esther Inglis today,” then the rest of the program gave a resounding answer: Celebrate them, remember them and speak about them, and continue to let their stories inspire future generations through art and memory.  

…

On a personal note, being the Outreach and Communications Intern for this Project has been not only an honor, but a joy. Through the events hosted this spring, I got to know a community passionate about learning and celebrating early modern Scottish women. I learned valuable lessons about engaging with the public in matters of history (and broadened by perspective on what “the public” even means), and to not underestimate the amount of interest that exists in even niche historical people and events. I am immensely grateful for my time with the project. 

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.