Tea-Table Miscellany

Allan Ramsay (c. 1684–1758) was a foundationally important poet, dramatist, song collector, theatre owner, cultural leader in art and music, and innovative entrepreneur in many spheres from language to libraries. Murray Pittock MAE FRSE is Bradley Professor and Pro Vice-Principal at the University of Glasgow, and Scotland’s leading cultural historian. A prizewinner of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and the British Academy, he has held visiting appointments or spoken at the universities of UC Berkeley, Boston, Cambridge, Chicago, Columbia, Harvard, UCL, New York University, Notre Dame, Oslo, Oxford, the Sorbonne, Virginia, Yale, Gresham College, the British Academy, The British Museum, Hampton Court, the Smithsonian, the House of Commons and many other locations. He is the General Editor of the Collected Works of Allan Ramsay. Brianna E. Robertson-Kirkland is the Music Research Associate on the ‘The Edited Collection of Allan Ramsay’ project and is a Lecturer in Historical Musicology at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. Her first monograph, Venanzio Rauzzini and the Birth of a New Style in English Singing: Scandalous Lessons was published in 2022.She is the Principal Investigator for the Royal Society of Edinburgh-funded project, Scotland’s Singing for Health Network and she has been a visiting researcher at the University of Sydney and at Chawton House. Past projects include establishing the Royal Society of Edinburgh-funded network, the Eighteenth-century Arts Education Research Network and working as Research Assistant for the Romantic National Song Network, also funded by Royal Society of Edinburgh.Select Publications include Music from home: Symonds sheet music collection and the Scots in Australia, Journal of the Sydney Society for Scottish History (Forthcoming, 2022), Venanzio Rauzzini and the Birth of a New Style in English Singing Scandalous Lessons (2022), ‘Damage to trees’: Performing Ramsay’s The Gentle Shepherd at Haddington Grammar School: A theory and its scholarly impact, Theatre Notebook 75(3), pp. 173-186 (2021), Mapping changes to the songs in The Gentle Shepherd, 1725-1788, Studies in Scottish Literature, 46(2), pp. 103-126 (2020) and Performance potential of Stationers’ Hall collections, Brio, 56(2), pp. 77-86 (2019).

The new volume of The Edinburgh Edition of the Collected Works of Allan Ramsay is a magnificent addition and a triumph for the editorial team. For readers familiar with Ramsay's work, but frustrated by the absence of a proper scholarly edition, this volume will more than satisfy. For those coming to Ramsay for the first time, it will introduce them to the man, his life and work, his deft editing practices, the rich musical scene in eighteenth-century Edinburgh and the significance of tea tables. The expert annotation illuminates his textual and musical choices, decisions and sources. Three hundred years after its first appearance, The Tea-Table Miscellany has been recovered and rehabilitated for the twenty-first century.

• AcknowledgementsAbbreviationsGeneral Editor’s PrefaceBiography of Allan RamsayTEXTIntroductionTea-Table Miscellany I (1723)Tea-Table Miscellany II (1726)Tea-Table Miscellany III (1727)Tea-Table Miscellany IV (1737)NOTESPreliminary Matter Sources for the Music Tea-Table Miscellany I (1723) Tea-Table Miscellany II (1726) Tea-Table Miscellany III (1727) Tea-Table Miscellany IV (1737) Appendix 1: Preface to 1729 edition Appendix 2: Descriptive Bibliography Appendix 3: List of Persons Appendix 4: Alexander Law’s list of variants between the 1723 and 1724 editions Glossary Bibliography Index of First Lines