Mobilizing an Eighteenth-Century Jacobite Manuscript in the Digital World
Jacobitism has gained new attention in popular culture as a result of the Outlander books (Diana Gabaldon) and the Starz TV series based on the novels. Our Lyon in Mourning project website launch event, which prioritized knowledge exchange and embodied learning, suggests that the actual history of the Jacobites can be just as compelling as its fictional representation.
This September, we invited students, faculty, staff and community members to gather at Bennett Library to celebrate the launch of the new Lyon in Mourning website, and my two recently published books, Jacobitism and Cultural Memory, 1699-1830, and Shaping Jacobitism, 1688 to Present: Memory, Culture, Networks, featuring new research on the Jacobites.
The launch, sponsored by Simon Fraser University’s Research Centre for Scottish Studies and SFU Library’s Digital Humanities Innovation Lab, included short lectures, lightning talks by research assistants, performances of Scottish music and song, refreshments (including a seed cake based on an eighteenth-century recipe), a quill-writing workshop, and a lesson on transcribing eighteenth-century handwriting.
I came to know about “The Lyon in Mourning” through reading a 3-volume printed version published by the Scottish History Society in 1895-96. In December of 2019, I saw the actual manuscript at the National Library of Scotland, leading to one of those eureka moments that make the research we do as Humanities scholars so exciting.
I held in my hands the very papers on which Robert Forbes left his literal marks so long ago. I realized that the printed version that I worked with previously, although useful, failed to capture the embodied nature of the manuscript and its material importance as a document of witnessing for the Jacobite movement.
“The Lyon in Mourning” is not just a compilation of data; it is a site of cultural memory painstakingly created by an individual who understood that history is always written by the victors and that the Jacobite side of the story would be erased and marginalized.
I resolved to do what I could to share my new understanding about the manuscript, and the “Lyon in Mourning” Digital Humanities Project was born.
Compiled by Scottish minister, Robert Forbes, between 1746 and 1775, “The Lyon in Mourning” discusses political power, memory, media and the silencing of marginal voices–issues that remain relevant today.
Forbes was a Jacobite, one of a group of eighteenth-century political dissidents dating from the 1688 regime change in Britain. Forbes was arrested during the 1745-1746 risings, led by Charles Edward Stuart (Bonnie Prince Charlie), and spent the rest of the rising in prison. When the Jacobites were eventually defeated, many were prosecuted, executed or transported in attempts to eliminate the Jacobite threat–but Forbes was released.
Upon returning to his home in Leith, the port city of Edinburgh, Forbes began collecting all the pro-Jacobite material he could find, including speeches, letters, poems, songs, narratives by those who had been involved in the rising, and accounts by those who aided Bonnie Prince Charlie during his five-month long escape to France.
The material collected in “The Lyon in Mourning” offers tantalizing glimpses, not just of well-known characters, but also of women, Gaelic-speakers and labouring-class individuals who are so often missing from the historical record. Although most of the items included are by male contributors, the materials also include oral histories of women, and numerous items sent by female informants.
At the heart of this work, lies our digital humanities project, “The Lyon in Mourning”.
With the help of Ralph McLean, Curator of Eighteenth-Century Manuscripts at the National Library of Scotland and developer, Joey Takeda at SFU’s Digital Humanities Innovation Lab, we digitized the manuscript (with funding provided by a Digital Research Fellowship from Edinburgh University’s Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities).
We then secured a SSHRC Partnership Engage Grant with the National Library of Scotland, enabling further archival research, and quantitative and qualitative analysis of the manuscript using Text Encoding Initiative (TEI).
The “Lyon in Mourning” Manuscript Project, is now available as an open access website, making the manuscript accessible for new audiences-both academic and general.
