Mary, Queen of Scots and the European Renaissance: objects, languages and music

June 9, 2022 at 5.30pm

In c.1558, Mary Queen of Scots, a multilingual European queen, composed and inscribed a verse in French in a manuscript book of hours, now on display at National Museum of Scotland. Timed to coincide with this exhibit, the SRS Lecture 2022 brings together scholars of Renaissance Scotland and Europe, to explore the connectedness of Scotland and sixteenth-century Continental Europe.

Combining musical interludes from Mary’s world, the roundtable chaired by Billy Kay will discuss the cultural and familial links that bound Scotland into Europe’s networks of knowledge, trade and the arts, facilitated by the shared languages of Latin and French. The inscription by a teenage Scottish queen, who also briefly became Queen of France, is a tangible product of those intimate connections.

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