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  • Posts Tagged ‘Chester Beatty Library Dublin’

    LOST STORIES OF ANCIENT WOMEN MARKS ST. BRIGID’S DAY AT CHESTER BEATTY

    Monday, February 6th, 2023

    Fragments: Lost Stories of Ancient Women is the title of the 2023 annual lecture at the Chester Beatty Library in Dublin. This year the series celebrates St. Brigid’s Day, the new permanent holiday in Ireland on the first Monday of February.  Few historical facts are known about St. Brigid. When it comes to ancient women’s lived experience, all we have are fragments. A scrap of a handwritten letter from mother to daughter, preserved two millennia in a fortuitously arid microclimate. A tiny metal amulet worn around the neck, bearing a rolled-up incantation to protect the wearer from menstrual pain. One or two verses, ignored by readers of the canonical gospels, implying that a woman may have personally bankrolled the earliest Jesus movement. Evidence for ancient women is virtually inaccessible compared to evidence for (elite) ancient men, but it is there if we are just willing to dig a little.

    The online lecture will be delivered by Dr. Sara Parks, historian on women and gender in antiquity, on February 8.  Dr. Parks will address the Chester Beatty Library’s ever increasing online and global audience from Nova Scotia, Canada where she is assistant professor of religious studies at St. Francis Xavier University.

    JAPANESE SURIMONO PRINTS AT CHESTER BEATTY LIBRARY

    Friday, March 3rd, 2017
    AN exhibition of Japanese Surimono prints at the Chester Beatty Library in Dublin marks the 60th anniversary of formal diplomatic relations between Ireland and Japan.  The word surimono means  ‘printed thing’. These privately-published prints, products of the flourishing literary culture of Edo Japan, were prepared as gifts for friends and acquaintances at New Year and other special occasions. The surimono commissioned by poetry circles in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries combine short verses composed at poetry gatherings with designs prepared by leading artists. Taking their subjects from the scholar’s desk and the literary canons of Japan and China, surimono embody the eloquence and amity of these cultivated salons and offer a glittering glimpse into a world rich in playful allusion. Sir Alfred Chester Beatty amassed a collection considered one of the finest in the world.  The exhibition runs until August 27, 2017.  Here is a small selection:

    Pekinese dog with decorative ball.
    Totoya Hokkei. Japan, 1826 © Trustees of the Chester Beatty Library, Dublin

    Series for the Hanazono Group: It is good to dress in new clothes.
    Totoya Hokkei. Japan, c. 1824 © Trustees of the Chester Beatty Library, Dublin

    Masazumi, Hakaze and Ab? visiting Rokujuen
    Yashima Gakutei
    Woodblock print
    Japan, c. 1819 © Trustees of the Chester Beatty Library, Dublin

    Courtesan preparing to inscribe a poem slip
    Keisai Eisen
    Woodblock print
    Japan, early 1820’s © Trustees of the Chester Beatty Library, Dublin