Thomas Muir at Glasgow: John Millar and the University

This chapter looks at the reformer Thomas Muir's education at the University of Glasgow, his time studying under John Millar, Professor of Law, and the events leading to Muir's withdrawal from the University

Scots Whay Hae! Robert Louis Stevenson Special

Podcast celebrating the life and work of Robert Louis Stevenson, featuring novelist Louise Welsh in conversation with Alistair Braidwood and Ronnie Young

Introduction

No abstract available

Book Review: The Physic Garden by Catherine Czerkawska

No abstract available

Walter Scott: The Man and his Legacy

Scots Whay Hae podcast celebrating Sir Walter Scott, commissioned by the ASLS for the Scottish Writer's Exhibition, MLA 2013. Featuring Professor Douglas Gifford in conversation with Ronnie Young

“A parcel of mash’d old rags”: some provisional remarks on the Burns Paper Database

This article offers some provisional findings of the Burns Database Project by the Centre for Robert Burns Studies at the University of Glasgow, with some remarks on the paper used by Burns, including paper type and sources, along with key samples and visual examples

Burnscast

Podcast celebrating Robert Burn

Introduction

No abstract available

'The Book of Maybees is very Braid': Ramsay's collection of Scots Proverbs and Enlightenment print culture

This article assesses the importance of Allan Ramsay’s Collection of Scots Proverbs (1737) in relation to his creative output and in the context of Enlightenment print culture, taking in later commercial and chapbook publication. The Scots Proverbs was Ramsay’s final printed book in 1737, and was reprinted within his lifetime, yet it also had a significant afterlife following his death in 1758. Although previous editors of Ramsay have been dismissive of the proverbs as a commercially-oriented collection of largely recycled sayings, Ramsay’s Scots Proverbs is an important part of his oeuvre for a number of reasons. The first printing of the Scots Proverbs formed part of Ramsay’s post-Union editorial and, more broadly, cultural project, particularly through a preface addressed ‘To the Tenantry of Scotland’. This article explores how Ramsay’s preface constructs a Scots pastoral image of labouring class auto-didacticism, and indeed positions its audience in a manner which is both consistent with and dependent on earlier works by the poet. In this context, the collection emerges as an act of cultural assertion, preservation and reinvention linked to the wider processes by which Ramsay (and indeed later writers) construct a synthetic post-Union literary vernacular and an assertively patriotic Scots print culture. The Collection of Scots Proverbs also experienced a significant afterlife, being republished across Scotland, and even further afield, throughout the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Moving into the 19th century, I examine both the repackaging and reassessment of Ramsay’s collection in Scottish print and in relation to the shifting concerns of paremiography during the Enlightenment