 Thank you. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. On behalf of the president and fellows, it's my great pleasure to welcome you to the Society of Antiquaries of London. My name is John Cooper, and I'm the director of research and publications here, there we go. I'm the director of the Society of Antiquaries. Sounds like a very grand title. It's not quite the top job, which at the moment I'm profoundly grateful. I'm a Tudor historian, a number of you in this room and online know me already. In fact, so many of you know me that this feels a little bit like my retirement party or possibly my wake about 15 years early. The Society of Antiquaries is the senior scholarly society devoted to the study of the material remains of the past. We were founded in 1707, probably in a pub. We are now a fellowship of some 3000 across the world. We have a Royal Charter. This is not the actual Royal Charter. But it does. I can quote from it. Since 1751, we are charged with the encouragement, advancement and furtherance of the study and knowledge of the antiquities and history of this and other countries. I like the way that in 1751 they said this country and sort of other countries slightly grudgingly, I think, but certainly we have become a global fellowship today. And we've been here in Burlington House since 1874. Despite appearances, we operate not as a private club, but as a scholarly and educational charity. We award research grants. We care for and share our collections. We engage in research ourselves. And we foster public knowledge of the material remains of the past. Those of you here in person, it is a particular pleasure to welcome you back into Burlington House. And for those of you online, please come and see us when you can. The Society of Antiquities surveys, studies and stands up for the past, but it is not stuck in it. Over the last couple of years, the Society has done a lot to reform its governance, which is less easy if you have a Royal Charter to open up its buildings and collections to researchers and to stage public events. And for me was Mary's Hand, an operatic performance in this room by McCall in Arts to highlight Queen's ship in 16th century England, and our Eworth portrait of Mary, which those of you in the room if you eyes right, then there she is. More recently, we had Lauren Mackay and Estelle Paranc discussing the political significance of the Berlin family in the context of a semi dramatized TV series that Estelle and Lauren were advising them. We've also created two recent exhibitions blood Royal back in 2017, and the current exhibition, Henry the eighth defender of the faith question mark that question mark course is all important. Now the second of those exhibitions is currently online, but those of you here in person will be able to go and see some of the objects for yourselves up in the library at lunchtime. There are other ways in which the society is looking forward and needs to do so. Fellowships need to renew themselves, or else they lose touch with emerging scholarly agenda. And that is what today is about. The position of early career researcher has probably never been more defined, but it is also precarious societies like ours need to work hard to engage with the next generation of scholars. I try to find something under the next generation which sounds terribly Star Trek, but you get you get my point. The reason for this is limited. But our expertise is vast and our facilities at least for the moment here in Wellington House are a fantastic asset. So those of you here in person and those watching online, I would say please engage with us. Find out about our collections. Let us help you make scholarly connections. The average age of his elected fellows has crept up over the years, we want to check and indeed reverse that process. The fellows of the future are likely to look like you may indeed be you. In my opinion, the Antiquaries are uniquely placed to foster new strategies of studying and defending the cultural value of the past, whilst also having a novelty to question sorry having the independence to question novelty for novelty's sake, we do not have to be modish here. But we are diverse and increasingly so. We reject what's old, simply because it's old. But to give you one example of that slightly obscure statement. The work that I've been doing on St Stephen's Chapel in the Palace of Westminster, and that's Murray Tramellan here in the front row and Kirsty Wright who can't be with us today have been carrying forward. The work can be traced back to the work of intrepid antiquaries in the 1790s, who were practically fighting their way into the Palace of Westminster to crawl behind wooden panelling to record medieval wall paintings, before they were torn apart by the reforming architect, and then destroyed in the great fire of the Palace of Westminster in 1834. I really feel that sense of deep descent from the past from those antiquaries of the 1790s, and the work that Murray and I are doing is absolutely dependent on those on that strong bedrock of antiquarian scholarship of the past. Early career conference, the organizers here on the front row Laura Jen and Murray have chosen the theme of the experience of politics and political culture. When I was studying for my doctorate, I wasn't terribly sure what political culture meant. In fact, I barely heard the phrase, until the late Kevin Sharp introduced me to someone else at a dinner. This is John Cooper, he works on Tudor political culture. I thought, do I? Maybe I do. That sounds quite classy. And I stole that description and I've used it ever since I work on Tudor political culture and so I used it as the subtitle for my first book, but it was sort of attributed to me before I really understood what it means. So what does political culture mean? Well, today, collectively, you are going to help to define that. I think you could find definitions in works of political science for sure the term comes in from political science. Maybe you could find definitions in history books, or at least since historians are often rather shy of defining these things, you will find competing understandings in the history books that you're reading about what political culture means. But to hazard my own definition, which I confess was completed on the number 38 from the Essex Road this morning, perhaps the very last time I complete my prep on the bus on the way to school. I would say that for British historians at least, political culture is a term that one has extended conventional definitions of high or parliamentary or court politics to constituencies classically outside the sphere of formal governance. The common people, whatever we call those in the early modern period. Historians, excluded communities of all kinds, Catholics, Jews, people of color. Historians have done very valuable work in recovering the political culture of those groups. Politically, political culture has de centered politics to encompass the regional and the local, both in their own right because they're important, and for their interactions with the political center. What I was doing in my doctorate a very long time ago, they was using the concept of political culture to explore the far west of England Cornwall and Devon, in terms of its institutions for sure, but also its society, and its architecture, and its material culture, and its identities. That's what I was attempting to do in my doctorate. That's the whole of the British Isles. The relationship between England and Ireland seems particularly open to this kind of political cultural approach to bring together the sometimes overtly national, and at their edges, even nationalistic historiographies of those two territories. I'm particularly welcome that what we're doing today is incorporating Ireland and England into the same conversation, and I heard very similar things being said at a recent online conference of Irish scholars of the same chronology as we're looking at today. Thirdly, and finally, the concept of political culture has broadened the source materials and the research questions and the disciplinary approaches of political history to incorporate representations of power in art, architecture and material culture. It's a political culture that the historian Kevin Sharp did so much to open up for my period of early modern England and attributed to me rather prematurely at this dinner that we were at. Now this strand of political culture has involved a dialogue between history and adjacent disciplines. I call it a dialogue actually at times I think it's more of a raiding party conducted by historians on other disciplines, but those disciplines clearly include English literature. So one of our speakers today Jonathan McGovern, who is beaming in from Nanjing. Actually, although in some senses as much of a tutor historian as I am actually studied for his doctorate within an English literature department and uses literary sources as his starting point. History of art, of course, more than one of you are historians about and also anthropology the whole approach to to ritual and to liturgy and to performance within some of the spaces that, for instance, royal policies again this is a very much an emerging agenda. So political culture takes in a sway of activity that historians might once have blanched at, actually, from dress, dress in the deep historical past up one stage not so long ago 2030 years ago would have been something that only historians on the margins would have been interested in now. So thanks to the work of people in this room and online, and also the work of our fellow Maria Haywood, questions of dress and performance and ritual at the Royal Court of Henry VIII are absolutely paramount. We've been taken in new directions as well to other aspects of court culture, gesture, dancing, those sort of social rituals that we are now recovering and learning so much more about that is far from a comprehensive definition of political culture. Hopefully it gives you something at least to work with I suspect that by the end of today you will come up be able to come up with a rather better explanation of what political culture might be between our chosen chronology of really the high medieval England and the early 19th century. So just to recap, in a very, you know, lecturing my second years at the University of York sort of way, political culture has extended, it has decentered, and it has broadened our definitions of history. You are almost welcome. Thank you for coming. And I'm now going to hand over to Jen Caddick.