Romantic Europe: The Virtual Exhibition

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A message from Alice Rhodes, BARS European Engagement Fellow (University of York)

Dear all,

Hopefully you’re staying safe and well in these challenging times. 

As many of us move our teaching and research online, we’d like to draw your attention to Romantic Europe: The Virtual Exhibition (RÊVE) as a digital resource to use both with your undergraduate and graduate students and in your own research.

From inkstands, books, and travelling cases to trees, clouds, and volcanos, RÊVE brings together iconic objects of Romanticism from across Europe alongside original commentary and cutting-edge research from academics and heritage professionals around the world. 

We’re now releasing new exhibits every Friday and you can follow us on Twitter (@euromanticism) for updates on our latest posts. We’d also love to hear how you’re making use of the exhibition in online teaching, whether it’s to explore the materiality and geography of Romanticism, as a research tool, a model for writing or research tasks, a creative prompt, a way of thinking about collections, curation and the way that objects speak to one another, or something else entirely. 

Last but not least, we’re delighted to announce the release of the first in our series of bi-weekly collections. The collections are designed to bring together individual exhibits from locations across Europe to facilitate productive juxtapositions and conversations. They are meant to make it easier to use the virtual exhibition. They are also meant to serve as a model for how users might themselves construct their own collections from within the virtual exhibition more generally. 

Our first collection, Romantic Authorship features “Petrarch’s Inkstand” by Nicola J. Watson, “The Table of Inkwells” by Jean-Marc Hovasse, “Adam Mickiewicz’s Tie Pin” by Małgorzata Wichowska, “Lord Byron’s Autograph at the Castle of Chillon” by Patrick Vincent, “Sir Walter Scott’s Elbow Chair: The Seat of Power” by Kirsty Archer-Thompson and “Two pages from Dorothy Wordsworth’s Grasmere Journal” by Jeff Cowton and can be viewed here