Tag: Medieval York

January 2017 Lecture

St William window procession

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.

2015 – A Golden Year for the Middle Ages?

Viking re-enactment in York
Viking re-enactment in York

In many respects it seems to me that the coming year is likely to be a golden year for Medieval studies because of the important anniversaries that fall in 2015. John Walsh in The Independent on 1st January helpfully pointed out that this summer it will be one thousand years since the Viking invasion of England led by Canute, son of Sweyn Forkbeard. Jorvik Viking Festival will take place on 14th-22nd February and will feature battle re-enactments, guided walks and other activities.

On 15th June it will be 800 years since the Magna Carta was agreed at Runnymede in Surrey. The British Library, Lincoln Castle and Salisbury Cathedral have copies of Magna Carta and are putting on exhibitions. Perhaps the Medieval Section could organise a day trip to Lincoln to see the exhibition? If you’d be interested in going to see the exhibition do please get in touch and I’ll try to organize a visit.

New £2 coin to commemorate Magna Carta
New £2 coin to commemorate Magna Carta

There will be a £2 coin commemorating Magna Carta on its obverse this year, and a set of stamps. However, if you look at the £2 coin (above) the designer has made a schoolboy error in depicting King John about to sign Magna Carta using a quill, whereas in fact, it would have been imprinted with the king’s seal. Nor would the king have troubled himself with the act of sealing. That was the job of a particular member of Chancery known as a spigurnel. This and many other fascinating details concerning Magna Carta can be found in the new book by Dan Jones, Magna Carta the Making and Legacy of the Great Charter (Head of Zeus, 2014).

Dan Jones' new book on Magna Carta
Dan Jones’ new book on Magna Carta

If Lincoln is beyond the pale for a Yorkshire Medieval Section, Yorkshire Medieval Festival takes place in York 1st-31st August with archery, birds of prey, jousting knights and of course the beautiful historic city as a setting. York Early Music festival takes place 3rd-11th July and features a new medieval soundscape for the 1928 silent classic La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc.

A third anniversary is that of the battle of Agincourt which was fought on 25th October 1415: 600 years ago.

These are all compelling reasons to celebrate our Medieval history, archaeology and heritage sites in 2015, and I note that Jeremy Black writing in The Times (3/1/2015) suggests that the celebration of anniversaries is in itself something of a Medieval practice: Henry III celebrated Edward the Confessor and Henry VIII the victories of Edward III and Henry V.

And as if there weren’t enough I read in the Daily Telegraph (2/1/2015) a report about the discovery of a hoard of 5,251 Anglo-Saxon silver coins in a lead container in a field near Aylesbury, Bucks., by metal-detector user Paul Coleman. There are coins of Ethelred the Unready (978-1016) and Canute (1016-1035). I saw some footage of what was described on the evening news as the excavation of the hoard. Actually it looked more like reaching into the bran tub at a children’s party.

No doubt the much-discussed reburial of the remains of Richard III will be attended by a reevaluation of the controversial king’s reputation. Whether his final resting place will be Leicester or York is impossible to say at the present time. As the speaker at our Christmas lecture on this subject just over a year ago, Bob Woosnam-Savage, said the chances of finding the last Plantagenet king’s remains fist attempt must have appeared impossibly low but the archaeology has surprised everyone and Richard now joins the list of famous historical personalities who have been rescued from the oblivion of a forgotten grave, to the extent of having the very flesh put back on their bones though the technique of facial reconstruction, a technique I’m proud to say was pioneered at University of Manchester.

Another reason to be cheerful, if any were needed, is the imminent publication of the Medieval Section’s journal Medieval Yorkshire, which is being compiled and edited by our Hon.Joint Editor, David Asquith, and Sue Alexander. This is the first time for a number of years that the section has been in a position to publish a journal. Seeing this in print will be the realisation of the third leg of a strategy to re-energise the section after it came close to being closed two years ago (the other two being the creation of this blog and the resumption of the section’s monthly lectures).