A talk for all those curious about the Jacobites! Professor Leith Davis reveals 'The Lyon in Mourning'. Supported by Friends of Aberdeen Library.
About this talk
In this talk, Leith Davis will discuss the stories contained in “The Lyon in Mourning,” highlighting material related to a number of Jacobite men and women who would be otherwise lost to history. She will focus in particular on the North East Scotland connections, shedding a spotlight on Jacobite activities in this area. Leith will also be discussing a Digital Humanities project she is leading, to use Text Encoding Initiative analysis on “The Lyon in Mourning” in order to gain a deeper knowledge of post-Culloden Jacobite activities and networks.
Background
The Jacobite manuscript known as “The Lyon in Mourning” was compiled and scribed between 1747 and 1775 by Robert Forbes, an Episcopalian minister originally from Rayne in Aberdeenshire who was a clergyman in Leith. Like many Scottish Episcopalians in the early eighteenth century, Forbes was a supporter of the Stuart royal family who had gone into exile after the 1688 Revolution. He attempted to join the 1745 Jacobite rising led by Charles Edward Stuart, but was arrested and imprisoned, then released in May, 1746, roughly one month after the rout of the Jacobites at Culloden on April 16, 1746.
Forbes returned to Leith, staying at the lodgings of Lady Bruce of Kinross at the Citadel during what was a dangerous time to be a Jacobite. Although the army of Charles Edward Stuart had been decimated and dispersed after Culloden, the British government sought to eliminate the threat of any further Jacobite unrest. In the midst of this fraught situation, Forbes conceived the idea of collecting and recording all the information he could find related to the Jacobite cause. He undertook numerous interviews with fellow Jacobites who came through Leith, pumping them for details, as well as writing to informants all over Scotland and England requesting information. It was necessary to collect and store this information, he indicated, “in order to strengthen & fix the Facts against all Contradiction & Cavilling” in the future. The resulting manuscript, “The Lyon in Mourning” consists of ten volumes amounting to 2,148 pages.
The digitized manuscript is available open access at Simon Fraser University's Digital Collections: Lyon in Mourning | SFU Digitized Collections
Biography: Leith Davis
Leith Davis (FRSC) is Professor in the Department of English and Director of the Research Centre for Scottish Studies at Simon Fraser University. She is the author of Acts of Union: Scotland and the Negotiation of the British Nation (Stanford University Press, 1998); Music, Postcolonialism and Gender: The Construction of Irish National Identity, 1725-1875 (Notre Dame University Press, 2005); and Mediating Cultural Memory in Britain and Ireland: From the 1688 Revolution to the 1745 Jacobite Rebellion (Cambridge University Press, 2022) as well as co-editor of Scotland and the Borders of Romanticism (Cambridge University Press, 2004), Robert Burns and Transatlantic Culture (Ashgate, 2012) and The International Companion to Scottish Literature in the Long Eighteenth Century (ASLS, 2021). She is also Principal Investigator of the “Lyon in Mourning” and "Reconstructing Early Circus" Digital Humanities projects. Her most recent book, Jacobitism and Cultural Memory will be published by Cambridge University Press in February, 2025.
- Hosted by
- University Collections
- Venue
- The Sir Duncan Rice Library, Lower Ground Floor Seminar Room
- Contact
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- This FREE talk is open to all and will take place in the Sir Duncan Rice Library in the Lower Ground Floor Seminar Room.
- If you would like to attend in person, please reserve a seat by following the booking link.
- Parking at the University is FREE at the time of this event.
REQUEST A RECORDING OF THIS TALK
We are hoping to record this talk. If you are unable to attend the event in person but would like to receive a link to the recording that will be prepared after the event, please email uoacollections@abdn.ac.uk
WRITING JACOBITISM
This public talk is paired with ‘Writing Jacobitism’ (a Research Institute of Irish and Scottish Studies Jacobite World Workshop) taking place earlier the same day. The workshop is being hosted by University Collections and the Research Institute of Irish and Scottish Studies. Please see the RIISS website for details Research Institute of Irish and Scottish Studies | The University of Aberdeen
- Booking
- Online booking available