The Ever Green (The Edinburgh Edition of the Collected Works of Allan Ramsay)

Alongside the other volumes in this new Collected Works, The Ever Green will transform academic and popular understanding of this pivotal but, until now, largely under-researched literary figure. It offers the first full and consistent edition of this text, based on the Bannatyne and other MSS (including an allegedly lost printed text of Alexander Montgomerie’s Cherrie and the Slae). This volume contains the entire text of the 1724 two volume collection (including the prefatory material, also reproduced-but without MS variants- in Prose), an introduction explaining Ramsay’s relationship with the material, how he came to be acquainted with it, and an explanation of his strategy to both present and co-create a Scottish literary tradition from before the Union of the Crowns in 1603. It also includes comprehensive notes on the text as Ramsay presents it.

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.

James J. Caudle has been a Research Associate at the University of Glasgow for the past five years. During his time at Glasgow, he has been part of the teams working on the pathbreaking Oxford Robert Burns (Correspondence) and Edinburgh Allan Ramsay (The Ever Green) Editions. Before that, he was employed as the Associate Editor of the Yale Editions of the Private Papers of James Boswell (2000–2017), and as a Professor at Ouachita Baptist University (1996–2000). He has received research fellowships from the Huntington and the Clark Libraries, and has also been awarded visiting fellowships at Lyon College and the University of St. Andrews. His research interests are in eighteenth-century British Studies, focusing on the social history of ideas (including clubs), the history of the book and publishing trade (including censorship and copyright), political thought in early modern mass media (particularly Georgian loyalist political sermons 1714–1789), and the functions of amateur or social verse in Georgian culture (looking at James Boswell and other versifiers and songsters as the ‘Contemporaries of Burns’).