Month: January 2017

Our speaker at the first Medieval Section lecture of the new calendar year on 14th January will be Dr Elisa Foster, and she will be talking about ‘Investigating the Head Reliquary of St William of York: Processions, Piety and Place.’ Dr Foster has kindly sent an abstract of her presentation:

From its foundation in 1408, the Corpus Christi Guild in York was responsible for organising a city-wide procession of the Eucharist. Although the shrine used during this procession was destroyed in 1546, inventory records and account rolls reveal that guild members donated luxury items and devotional objects to attach to its surface. Such offerings were quite unusual for Eucharistic shrines, but were more commonly found on the shrines of saints, like those that could have been seen in York Minster. Although the majority of these shrines were located at fixed sites in the cathedral, the head reliquary shrine of St William was borne in procession around the city on the feast of the saint’s translation, and inventory records indicate that it was also adorned with luxury objects. These shrines are not often examined together, but both objects were deeply connected to the civic identity of late medieval York. This paper will argue that that the processional shrines of the Head of St William and Corpus Christi encouraged emulation and rivalry, both spiritually and civically. A comparative analysis of these shrines and their processions thus aims to reveal new insights into the complex nature of medieval civic identity in the City of York.

Elisa Foster a Henry Moore Foundation Post-Doctoral Research Fellow based at the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds. She received her PhD from Brown University in the United States, where she wrote her thesis on sculptures of the black Madonna in European art from c. 1200-1700. Her research on this topic has been recently published in Studies in Iconography, Peregrinations: A Journal of Medieval Art and Architecture and the edited volume, Envisioning Others: Race, Color and the Visual in Iberia and Latin America. In addition to her research on Black Madonnas, Elisa is co-editor a collection of essays titled Devotional Interaction in Medieval England and Its Afterlives, forthcoming in 2017. Her research in Yorkshire expands her interest in destroyed objects and iconoclasm, focusing specifically on the shrine of Corpus Christi in York, from which her talk on Saturday 14th January is derived.

As usual the lecture will be held at Swarthmore, 2-3pm. We look forward to seeing you there and have a Happy New Year.