Professor David Parkinson
- Project status
- Ongoing
- Programmes
- Visiting Fellowships
Walking Perth’s Past: The Muses Threnodie for New Audiences
This Visiting Fellowship has at its core the completion of a new scholarly edition for the Scottish Text Society of The Muses Threnodie (1638). This poem describes a series of walks out from the town of Perth, often past landmarks which remain significant features in the local landscape. This poem gives a rare and remarkable insight into the lives, amusements, and anxieties of the residents of early modern Perth. It provides valuable perspectives on how early modern Scots perceived their natural and built environments.
The edition will be designed as a reference tool to help modern audiences better understand how previous generations interacted with nature and architecture, and to inform local discussions about such interactions today. Considered more fully, this project will disseminate scholarship to a wider audience who might be surprised and pleased to find they have a use for it, indeed a stake in it.
Outputs and media
‘Wyntoun, the Anonymous, and Agnes Randolph’
Workshop at the University of Edinburgh - 29-31 August 2023
'The Muses Threnodie (1638) and Perth’s Lade: Crosscurrents between Text and Burgh'
Public talk at the Friends of the Perth and Kinross Archives - 21 September 2023
'Henry Adamson, The Muses Threnodie, and seventeenth-century Perth'
Seminar presentation at the Centre for Scottish and Celtic Studies - 17 October 2023
‘Walking Perth’s Past: Memory and Place in a Seventeenth-Century Burgh’
Public talk at the Friends of the Strathmartine Centre, St Andrews - 14 November 2023
‘Yet these small fish ov’rcome these watrie mountaines: Salmo salar, Scottish Rivers, and Cultural Memory’
Presentation at the Environment, Conservation, and Humanities workshop, hosted by the University of Bristol - 23 November 2023
‘Walking Perth’s Past: some hows and whys’
Presentation at the 'Approaching the Scottish Seventeenth Century' workshop, hosted by the University of Sussex - 27 November 2023