 Hello, everyone. Good evening. All right, I'm going to start now. So can I, sorry, sorry, sorry to interrupt, but we are ready to start. Okay, so welcome to everybody, both in the room and everyone at home. And I, if you are at home and you want to ask a question during the Q&A session, you can just type into the Q&A box on Zoom and someone here, a staff member, will read the question aloud. If you're in the room, of course, just raise your hand. There is closed captioning available in the remote session and also the lecture will be recorded and made available at a later date. Now, I have a fire safety announcement to read. It is a prescribed wording, so I will read it now. And then I will go ahead and introduce our speaker tonight, Dr. Tom Nixon. All right, so safety first. There are no fire drills scheduled for the duration of this event. If the fire alarm sounds, please leave your belongings behind and calmly begin to evacuate the building. Your nearest fire exit is on the ground floor through the door you entered to the center. Please assemble outside 28 Bedford Square to the right as you leave the building and do not leave the area or attempt to return to the center until you have been advised it is safe to do so by a member of the PMC staff. All right, so onto the substance of our evening. So I am so delighted, could not be more delighted to introduce Dr. Tom Nixon to give our lecture this evening. So Tom is actually best known as a scholar of the art and architecture of medieval Spain, and particular for his book about Toledo Cathedral, Building Histories in Medieval Castile. But in fact, he actually knows everything about late medieval architecture everywhere. So although he is a specialist in medieval Spain, actually he knows everything. And I think his specialization in the visual culture of medieval Spain, medieval Iberia, is relevant in any number of ways to the subject of our lecture series. In fact, we've had conversations about the terminology of the Iberian Peninsula, Spain, that is very much analogous to the kinds of things we discussed in the initial lecture about how one can be very productively tongue tied about the way in which one refers to the medieval instantiation of the countries that we know as the United Kingdom, Spain, and so forth. So he has that kind of conceptual connection to our material. But he also knows a great deal about the art and architecture of Medieval England, particularly as it relates to the wider world, his sort of term that he sometimes uses for that as well. So one thing that he's done, in addition to his extensive publications on these subjects, is he has constructed, created a master's course called England, Europe, and Beyond Art, Identity, Trade, and Politics in the Middle Ages. Now, academics are extremely good at calling for things and then not doing them. We must have more courses like Tom's. And in fact, Tom has actually gone ahead and he's really done it. And not many people actually have the knowledge and intellect and imagination really to do that properly, but Tom does. So I could not be more happy that he accepted our invitation. So his contribution this evening is on metamorphosis. Please, Tom. Well, thanks, Jessica, for that very kind introduction. I'm not sure I was very knowledgeable at the beginning of the process of teaching that MA, but certainly I've learned a lot from my students and from last minute preparation for seminars and so on as well. But thank you to Jessica and to Lloyd for the invitation to speak in this really interesting series and to the PMC also for hosting me and this whole series. So really, what I want to ask tonight is, can we speak meaningfully of a global Britain in the Middle Ages? You might ask, can we speak meaningfully of a global Britain even now? But it is very rare for political rhetoric, the rhetoric of global Britain now, to align with disciplinary agendas as it does in this case. But for me, at least, the so-called global turn in the humanities poses this question more urgently than any think tank paper. Where do medieval studies sit in a rapidly expanding global art history? This question has been posed for Europe more broadly and for places like Italy, but never specifically for Britain, at least as far as I know. Well, in the Middle Ages, as now, trade is central to questions of globality, and I'm going to talk about it a lot today. So it's striking that already in the 12th century, liberties of London, a series of regulations for London traders, we find mention of foreign merchants bringing goods from afar. These include pepper, cumin and ginger, grown in India or Southeast Asia, alum, a salt produced, a salt product used for dyeing found in Western Egypt and Chad, reveal wood, a cloth dye extracted in India and Indonesia, and resin and incense, some of it probably from Arabia or India. Some of these products came along the well-established silk roads that passed from China and through Central Asia to Europe, but most probably came via the Indian Ocean up the Red Sea from Egypt to Venice and then to Northern Europe. So the movement of these goods underlines a key issue for medieval globality, sorry to use that kind of horrible word, but anyway, it's kind of so embedded in the literature that I can't avoid it. But this key issue, I think, particularly if you think about the Middle Ages, is that in the Middle Ages global trade took place largely across a series of short interconnected journeys with objects passing through many hands. Although monsoon winds had long established circum-oceanic trade in the Indian Ocean, it was only from the late 13th century that ships from the Mediterranean, for instance, could sail directly to England. And only from the late or mid to late 15th century onwards were larger and fully rigged ships from Europe able to make long distance trans or inter-oceanic journeys as a kind that in the 16th and early 17th centuries connected Portugal to India and beyond Spain to the Americas and ultimately Britain to the so-called East Indies and to Newfoundland. So that's a key issue, trade, and this idea of kind of short journeys. A second key issue is that of recycling, whereby precious goods were repurposed on multiple occasions in the process losing all or most associations with their place of origin. This is exemplified by precious metals and stones as found, for example, on this really extraordinary crown associated with Princess Blanche of England and probably made in Paris or Prague in the 1370s. It's now in Munich. So in the 14th century, much of the gold circulated in Europe ultimately originated in West Africa or was extracted from new mines in Slovakia and Hungary. And Lloyd's already spoken a little bit about this in the introduction. But we also know that gold objects were constantly pawned, melted down and repurposed, so that for all we know the gold for use for this crown could ultimately derive from mines in Scotland, Wales, Cornwall or elsewhere exploited by the Romans, but largely exhausted by the Middle Ages. Likewise, it's been shown that most precious stones and pearls in medieval Europe came from mines in India, Sri Lanka or nearby seas, but such stones were also constantly recycled. And so we can't say that these objects are necessarily coming into 14th century. England they could have been hanging around in treasuries, repurposed on multiple occasions. Many of them could even have come in the Roman period. But what is I think kind of interesting but also frustrating about precious stones like this is that their hard shiny surfaces reveal a little about their histories, histories of extraction, exploitation, transportation, labour and commodification that transformed free matter from the earth into prized and precious objects. So that's why in this lecture I'm going to focus on metamorphosis and on objects that have been transformed, carved or remounted in the course of their journey to or from Britain. Not only does this process of metamorphosis help us to fix objects in a particular place and moment as we cannot really do for spices or precious stones, but it also provides evidence of the reception of these objects and of close artistic engagement and scrutiny as we will see. So the point is that all these objects have been modified in some ways in their kind of their histories of their mobility and those modifications mean that for one thing artists and craftsmen are engaging very very closely with these objects you know they're not just sitting up in a kind of display cabinet but the ways that they repurpose these objects as we'll see tells us something about the ways that they value them. And I put on last week's lecture there was a comment about scales which is very kind of pertinent to this digital world. So just so you get a sense of the relative scales of the objects I'm going to talk about, I put them here approximately to scale. So Britain's relationship with medieval Europe has been studied exhaustively in the past two centuries. So in this lecture I really want to look beyond the borders of Europe using these five objects, they're really that kind of object types, to tell a story about Britain's place in the medieval world but without I hope placing Britain necessarily in the centre of that world. I don't want to re-inscribe a kind of Britannocentric or Anglicentric view of medieval history. So my first object that I'm going to talk about is this, the luck of Eden Hall, will be very familiar to some of my students who've worked on this. This is a relatively small glass vessel that you can go and see in the V&A at the end of their medieval and Renaissance galleries. And I do recommend if you haven't ever looked at it that you do go and look at it for yourself because what these photos, which are very beautiful photos on the V&A website don't really capture is the fragility of it. I mean this is such a fragile glass object. It's so delicate and the magic of this object, and I will talk about the magic of this object in a moment, I think stems from that sense of fragility. So it's called the luck of Eden Hall in part because it was first documented in the 1670s in the possession of the Musgrave family at their house in Eden Hall in Cumbria. And those are early records of it associated with a legend as well that basically if this shattered so too would be bring bad luck on the inhabitants of Eden Hall. But what interests me about this object, well several things that interest me, but one is that we know although it's only documented from the 1670s we have this purpose built leather case for it which must date to the late 14th or probably the 15th centuries. And I think what's one of the striking things about this I think is that if we look at the design on this case it's pretty standard it must be said for leather cases. And these kind of objects have been made for most precious objects in the Middle Ages. But the reason I think a kind of conversation that takes place between these relatively kind of standardized motifs that you find on the leather object and these vegetal patterns that you find on the original glass vessel. You can also see that on the lid of this case we have in this ribbon script the IHS that the name the monogram of Christ that in the late Middle Ages was commonly ascribed with magical or apatropaic powers. And these this I think suggests first of all the people were always nervous about this object breaking but secondly that maybe already had these kinds of talismanic associations in the Middle Ages although they're better recorded from the 17th century onwards. So what is this extraordinary glass vessel and why was it prized? Well it's of a type that's actually manufactured quite widely in the Levant and Eastern Mediterranean in the 14th and 13th centuries and particularly associated with workshops in Egypt or Syria and I'm showing you two examples here both of the kind of vessel with a very similar shape and one with relatively similar decoration. But the I think what must have appealed to the owners of this object in England at least by the 15th century was that this kind of coloured enameled transparent glass was something that simply couldn't be made in England at that date. So this was a kind of a marvel of a technological marvel that couldn't be rivaled and in fact we can find evidence scattered and shattered that there were other kinds of glass vessels made in Egypt and elsewhere that also found their way to England and here I'm showing you you can see a heavily damaged object that was recovered from a 15th century rubbish pit in Abingdon in Oxfordshire and this quite small glass vessel that's now in the Museum of London but was probably made in Syria. So when we start to look for these kinds of objects we can find them coming in perhaps surprising numbers both in Britain but also more widely in Europe in fact I would say that the numbers of these objects in Britain are much smaller than they are for particularly places like Venice but also in Germany and here I show you another version or a very similar object that's kept now in Cologne which also you can see has its leather case whoever displayed this I think must have been nervous about it's putting it the right way around so it's been inverted but you can see you know this is actually a relatively common type and so we can think of it as one of a number of objects that come from Islamic or perhaps we should say an Arabic context that found their way to England and the British Isles in the Middle Ages. These objects don't seem to have been compromised by the association with with Islam these were in most cases luxury or prestigious items just like you know we might think of with a kind of Persian rug today and in many cases we can identify their point of origin because they've got script Arabic or pseudo Arabic script and in many cases they seem to have carried apotrapeic associations the ability to ward off evil. Arabic culture throughout medieval Europe was celebrated as a kind of center of scientific learning but that included learning about magic derived ultimately from Greek learning. So I'm showing you these examples but actually in this lecture I'm not going to dwell on contacts with the Islamic world because that will be addressed in much greater depth by Amanda Leicester in the next lecture and nor am I going to talk very much about silks either there is an important story about the silk roads and England's relationship with it but for one thing they're extremely difficult to photograph the very small number of instance of Chinese silks have been identified in England it's just very difficult to get a sense of them from photographs so I'm going to leave those aside and really focus on these five objects and but what I do want to acknowledge is that it's not this story is not only about objects coming to to Britain but also about patrons and objects moving around the world. So we might think of pilgrimage being kind of one classic means by which ideas are circulating in the Middle Ages we've already talked about trade crusade was certainly another one and here we can see the epitaph of Sir Hugh Wake who took part in the seed of Ascalon in the 13th century and repurposed this Fatimid inscription that records the construction of a tower there and had a mason chisel onto it his family arms so we can see the very deliberate kind of clash of languages if you like in Spain they would very often use the reverse of an epitaph or an inscription like this but here I've never seen the back of this I don't know if they could have done that but this seems to me something very deliberate about placing the arms of a crusader over an inscription like this and turning it on its side at the same moment but I want to move to my second object which in some ways is very closely related to the luck of Eden Hall it's a coconut cup it's now kept at eating college and like the luck of Eden Hall it's a precious vessel in some ways that has come from afar and been repurposed I've chosen this out of many coconut cups because it bears an inscription around the lip which you can perhaps see here the records that it was given by John Edmunds professor of theology and who was a fellow of the college at Eden in fact we know that he was elected fellow in 1491 and that he died in 1526 so this gives us a kind of a time range for this object and in fact if we look at the inventories of eating college and inventories are a really important source for us in understanding the kind of richness of collections in the Middle Ages many objects that no longer survive we can see that this was in fact just one of several coconut cups that was kept at eating college and we can see here in inventories the 1530s that they had item and nut with a cover standing upon three eagles feet holy guilt so that's not this one it had eagles feet another one item a great standing nut with a cover holy guilt standing upon three hearts and the foot and then another one with a st. Christopher in the top of the cover so none of those records this coconut cup in fact but what you get a sense of I hope from these kind of inventory is quite kind of Zhijun inventory entries is that these were relatively common place items in an institution like Eden had several coconut cups and inventories are an interesting source because they establish in many ways a kind of global cartography of their own in many other inventories these are described in the nuts of India and in fact in inventories we find descriptions of a whole range of goods that were given or scribed sometimes real sometimes fictitious points of origin for treasured goods from Baghdad Damascus Tartary India Byzantium Antioch Seville Luca Venice Cyprus Genoa Paris and elsewhere so these inventories suggest to us a kind of a world that certainly extended well beyond Britain's shores but indeed beyond the borders of Europe and in fact they survive a considerable number of coconut cups from medieval contexts in England many of them survive in Oxbridge colleges and other educational establishments that New College Oxford a few weeks ago where they've got three and a few other places like Winchester College we know had lots of them and these we know were placed on high table in the early modern period alongside ostrich eggs, nautilus shells, exotic vessels of salt and so forth like a kind of cabinet of curiosities so these are at one level kind of elite objects of curiosity and wonder but on the other hand as Catherine Kennedy has shown written sources in the mid 13th century onwards so just actually these were relatively common objects owned by fishmongers widows and up to the level of kings so it's not quite true that these are these were common objects you know the very fact that you choose to mount them in silver and and often deal with that silver suggests that these were high prestige updates but actually in inventories and wills from the 1250s onwards you can find records of hundreds of these coconut cups they were coming in considerable numbers the eating college one is unusual only in so far as we can fix with some confidence a date for it and that it's relatively early so why this fascination for coconut cups well we know that coconuts in the Middle Ages were prized for their medicinal value particularly the milk and the flesh of the coconut and Catherine Kennedy has suggested that we think about this as a kind of repurposing of the container of that medicine in the same way that for instance ceramic alborello jars that were used in pharmacies and so on were often repurposed as vases and other kinds of objects most of these coconut cups and coconuts probably came from India we can track them in port manifestos and so on came into the Red Sea and then into Venice and into the rest of Europe and what's I think quite striking is that the examples from Britain we find that most of those coconuts they polish them up you know coconuts as you probably know they don't look like this you have to you know they've scooped out the flesh and then they've polished them sometimes they may even have painted them they seem to like this this dark quality but that seems to be particular to Britain and and I show you here really for no better reason than than I love it this coconut cup that's now in the V&A from Ulm but it's one of a series of coconuts made in Germany where they've carved into the shell of the coconut and here you can see they've created this wonderful kind of feathery pattern and I just love the idea of this kind of flapping ostrich egg on the high table a conversation piece I'm sure and and even the the British ones may have served a similar function but I want to to underline this point that these objects which speak seductively to us in some ways of the global reach of Britain or of the global networks in which Britain was entangled that these objects are traveling in multiple routes we don't have direct contact in this period between England and India or England even England and Egypt in fact and these objects and their movement is mediated by a whole series of middlemen if you like and here I show you this wonderful Petrus Christi painting that's in the met of a goldsmith in his shop and this it's been suggested may in fact be James II of Scotland buying a ring for his bride Mary of Gelder's but but what's interesting or particularly interesting for our pubs is that in so far as we understand this to be a kind of remotely reliable view of the interior of a goldsmith's shop we can see here that we've got all manner of precious and exotic items including coconut cup you can see there but also pearls and gems coral rock crystal and other precious or exotic items and so goldsmiths I think play an important role as conduits of these foreign objects and probably we must have been responsible for setting this my third object in a new mount probably in the late 15th or early 16th century and this object takes us further afield because the item that's been remounted here is a seledon bowl made probably in northern China in the Loprun kilns this is a piece of of glows glazed stoneware in its original context actually not particularly precious object but on arrival in England probably in the late 15th early 16th century and was clearly thought to merit this new mounting and this I've chosen really as one of the earliest examples of Chinese porcelain that we can trace in western Europe. Chinese porcelain has long been known to Arabic travelers but wasn't really fully described until Marco Polo did so in the late 13th century and this is one of the very earliest examples of it in Britain and if we compare it with our coconut cup from Eaton and if you look particularly at the kind of mounts you see here with these very distinctive foliage designs or you look at the base with this kind of beading actually I think it's quite possible this was mounted by the same goldsmith these two objects a goldsmith with access to these kinds of precious objects in the same way as we saw in that Petrus Christus painting but this ranks as the third earliest piece of Chinese or intact Chinese porcelain that we can track with any certainty in medieval Europe. The oldest is this vase the so-called fontil vase it has an interesting story it was owned and kept at one point at Fontil Abbey this is a much more precious piece of Chinese porcelain with this high relief but we know from this 18th century watercolor by Bartolome Remy that it had it was originally mounted and in fact the heraldry on those mounts suggests a connection between the Hungarian king Louis the Great and it's been suggested on the basis of this heraldry that it was a gift by King Louis the Great to Charles of Duratso to celebrate his succession to the kingdom of Naples in 1381 in fact four years later he'd seize the throne of Hungary so we can say with some security that this jug was in Europe by the late 14th century possibly earlier there's lots of other porcelain in collections it's not mounted where it's very difficult for us to know at what point it arrived but here we have a valuable example and the next oldest example is this another sellard and bowl mounted in gilt silver and now in Germany and we know that it was in the possession of Philip von Katzen Ellenbogen and that he made a pilgrimage to Acre in the Holy Land in the 1430s we also know that Acre was an important kind of entrepot where goods from east Asia could be acquired so it's almost certain that he acquired this in Acre in the 1430s bought it back to Germany and had it mounted but I think what's significant to me about these objects it's kind of very early traces of contact albeit at several removes with China is that they predate an absolute explosion of Chinese porcelain that arrives in England or Britain in the 16th century again we only can identify those ones in the 16th century largely because either they're recorded in inventories or their written sources or because they have the 16th century mounts and a lot of them have marks that indicate that they're made in England pretty much all of these made between the 1560s and 1600s so we have this this moment when as it were Britain opens up to a much greater extent with imports from China and some of that it seems likely came not necessarily directly from trade with China which does begin but a little bit later and but with is owed to Portuguese trade with China which really begins in the mid 16th century and indeed some of these some of this porcelain we know was acquired by English pirates and who sat Portuguese galleons laden with Chinese porcelain so they come via a securities route but this porcelain was highly prized in 16th century England again because they didn't know how to make it actually we have the right clays you can make it and in the 18th century they they go wild and make lots of this kind of sheen ones are really but at this point they in fact they sometimes call it shell they thought it came from a shell it's hard glossy and surface this blue and white was very highly prized and it's worth saying that some of that seems to have come from Portuguese galleons but significant quantities may also have come via Ottoman Turkey I mentioned before that albic travelers had long known about Chinese porcelain there were huge collections of Chinese porcelain for instance in Baghdad from the 11th century onwards but the Ottoman rulers also built up various substantial collections of Chinese porcelain and in the late 15th century Potters and Isnik in Western Anatolia also found a way to glaze vessels in a way that imitated Chinese porcelain and that's what we see here actually these objects which in many ways resemble those examples of Chinese porcelain these are made examples of Isnik jobs made in Western Anatolia some of them in their decoration imitating that Chinese porcelain but some of them experimenting with these really wonderful kind of vibrant colors that are quite different from the Chinese tradition and I think I mean I'm very interested in these objects because I think they speak to this kind of moment in the 16th century when we can start to talk about these properly global networks but I think they also underline how until the late 16th century Britain would very much at the periphery of these Eurasian networks that included the old silk roads the black red and Mediterranean seas and the Persian gulfs and later the Portuguese routes around the Horn of Africa and we can find much larger quantities of Chinese porcelain for instance in Portugal in this date and England is still on the periphery but its position does mean that it was also a kind of contact zone receiving goods from what has sometimes been called the global north I made up of well for our purposes consisting of a network really of traders in fur walrus teeth and other goods in Scandinavia Russia Iceland Greenland and even Newfoundland and one symptom of this contact with this global north is the arrival in England of ivory teeth from arctic animals including this long tooth from a normal which probably maybe it's slightly larger than it is in real life I can't I've lost my sense of scale but only slightly longer than it is in real life but this is properly the the tooth of a narwhal with its distinctive long straight form but then twisting up a section which you can see here these narwhals probably weren't hunted they were they're quite elusive creatures but it's thought that these teeth may have been particularly found from narwhal carcasses and they're hunted by by killer whales and their carcasses might have been beached and in fact remarkably a pair for this object that's now in the vna also survives in the world museums in Liverpool if we look it's very difficult to show this because it's such an awkward shape for slides and so on but if we zoom in on different parts of it onto the top part you can see the way that the craftsman has adapted this design can't have been someone who is very accustomed to to carving narwhal tusks and because there simply weren't enough of them but if we look at the lower section of this tusk then we can see this extraordinary sequence of scrolling vines with nude figures and birds and so forth and if we compare that for instance to something like the western portal that Lincoln Cathedral carved in the mid 12th century we can see very similar kinds of forms which suggests that this narwhal tusk was carved in England probably in the mid 12th century and incidentally I mean just as we've got it on the screen you know this portal at Lincoln which is very closely related to the portal to Sandinine or the France what you can also see here is something that I think that Amanda will be talking about in next week's lecture these confronted birds in roundels which is an absolutely kind of classic feature associated with Islamic silks so these objects are speaking to the north to the south and in all directions we don't know what this was used for you can see the little these little holes that look like it might have had metal bands or something that twisted around the tusk and the same at the center here and it may be although I'm not completely convinced by this suggested that it was used as a kind of candle holder you can see in this wonderful painting also in the Met and these decant holding these long slender tapers and the longer the taper the more prestigious but what was quite common related is that you would you would find a kind of supporter for that taper that resembled it and if you look in detail I hope you can see the kind of characteristic twisting forms of a narwhal tusk so you would spike your your wax candle to the top of it and then be able to create these very impressive forms so there are there are some signs of scorch marks and so on of these that suggest that they might have been used as candle holders but we also know famously that from certainly from the mid 14th century onwards and narwhal tusks were associated with the unicorns and with the power to to neutralize poison so you can see two famous examples of that here but in the 12th century when these were cars there's no evidence that they were thinking about these tusks in relation to unicorns or poison this animal on the left you might not immediately recognize but I do I'm very fond of this miniature from the westmost bestiary which shows a walrus because it's important to underline the fact that narwhal is just one form of animal tooth that's coming into Britain in the middle ages I'm notably I've walrus ivory which was widely used in medieval Britain particularly up until the 13th century but beyond that as well and we know that well it's thought that in the middle ages there might have been walrus colonies in the outer hebrides but certainly walruses were hunted and traded widely across this global north and as an example of this I think I particularly like the example of the lewis chess pieces and some of them now in the BM some of them in the National Museum of Scotland which are carved mainly out of walrus ivory although some of them are carved from the teeth of sperm whales and so these objects speak so they were found in the outer hebrides in the 19th century but they speak again to this place of contact we have the game of chess which originated in Iran or India by the time that these were made had spread to the outer hebrides and these were realized in the tooth or the ivory of walruses so we've got ivory's coming from ivory coming from these arctic animals but also in the middle ages and particularly from 13th century onwards we have ivory's coming from particularly African elephants in England here's Matthew Parris's really wonderful drawing clearly done from observation of an elephant that had been gifted via the Securities Route to Henry III in 1254 it was kept at the Tower of London and then ultimately its bones are buried somewhere westwards to Abbey but here I'm showing you one of the rare examples of an ivory elephant ivory that we know was carved in England this one bears the arms of John Granderson who was Bishop of Exeter in the 1330s so we can see again the way that Britain's particular position means it's connected to these multiple networks on the north and in the south and if we look at the distribution of narwhals or walruses or think about those trade routes for sub-Saharan from sub-Saharan Africa through the Sahara desert bringing ivory into Spain the Mediterranean and then ultimately into England we can see how using the kind of distribution of these animals we can think about the globality of Britain in the Middle Ages if you like or if you probably don't like that horrible term but I mean interesting also to think about the way that these patterns have shifted as with global warming and against it the ice patterns and so on so these are the distribution of these animals changes over time I want to turn now to my last object which is one that Lloyd has already shown briefly in the introduction to these this series so far I've looked at objects that arrived in Britain from afar but it's also important to emphasise that objects and materials were also exported from England or taken from England as gifts or for other purposes so we think about the kind of primary export goods from Britain in the Middle Ages they include tin mined in Cornwall and used across Medieval Europe it's quite rare in Europe alabaster quarried and carved in the Midlands and distributed across Europe from Iceland to Portugal or Croatia wool cloth and precious embroidery particularly the kind of embroidery known as Oppos Anglicanum which also spread across Medieval Europe but this particular object in fact travelled further field and it's one of a group of objects that that are linked in different ways and but particularly through their their manufacture these jugs and I'm showing them approximately to scale in some cases bear heraldry and emblems that allow us to link them to to date them to the late 14th century although possibly a little bit afterwards and they also bear a series of inscriptions kind of homely wisdom such as the one that you see on the Robinson jug now in the VNA God's grace be in this place our men stand away from the fire and let just one come near so you might wonder why I should out of these examples choose this one which is now in Leeds City Museum but well there were two reasons really one is that this is one of two jugs that was found in the 1880s in fact at the base of a sacred tree we don't know exactly where in Kumazi in what is now Ghana and probably in the Palace of the King of the Isante or possibly in the nearby Royal Mule Mausoleum but here you see it together with that other vessel from the British Museum a few years later a third item was retrieved and when I say retrieved I mean stolen and taken back to Britain so these objects we know were in West Africa in the late 19th century but we don't know how they got there there were no direct contacts between England and West Africa in the 14th and 15th centuries that we do know there was plenty of Trans-Saharan travel that gold is going in one direction and things like copper in the other direction but we do know that there was direct contact with West Africa in and Portugal in the early 16th century and we know in fact that the Portuguese gave all sorts of gifts to their trading partners of this type and so it has been suggested that maybe this came these came via Portugal it's also significant that Portugal and England had a very strong diplomatic and trading relationship in the 14th and 15th centuries which might explain how these vessels had got there in the first place but the short answer is we don't know exactly how they ended up there but I've chosen this one because it's the one example of an object that was modified whilst in Ghana the lid here which I've not had an opportunity to examine for myself was made it's thought not in in England but was made in Ghana so this isn't an object that's undergone this kind of metamorphosis and then as Lloyd mentioned when it came back to England it received a little shield that records its ownership by the Prince of Wales own Yorkshire Regiment. What I find very striking about these objects is that we can think about them in relation to a series of other objects from or in Ghana that were also made out of copper alloys copper would wear to be rare in West Africa it was traded for gold in fact we know throughout the Middle Ages and these English vessels formed part of a group of copper alloy vessels from distant lands that were highly prized by Akan communities in Ghana and these include seven brass bowls and basins made in Egypt and brought to Ghana and still associated with mythic events and powerful ceremonies so I'm showing you here a photo by Raymond Silverman of one of these objects in the Socombe when he traveled there in the 70s and 80s he found seven of these objects some of them have since been stolen but what you can see I hope very clearly is that this is an object that was not made in Ghana but was made in Mamluk Egypt and it resembles something like this object that's now in the Courtauld galleries and these objects again we don't know exactly when but we can be sure that some of them were at least were there by the early 15th century had been traded across or moved across the Sahara and were treasured as important items and further evidence for that recognition of the special value of these objects comes from a whole series of copper vessels that were made in Ghana from probably the 16th century onwards a lot of them from the 19th century but which show very clearly that the artists responsible for these vessels took inspiration from these imported objects if you look at this Kuduro an object an ornate brass vessel typically owned by kings and courtes in which gold dust and nuggets were kept these were receptacles for their owner's car their life force and were used in ceremonies during their owner's lifetime and then left in burials but if we look at the decoration of this with these kind of distinctive forms and roundels I think it's clear that they represent a kind of translation of the motifs found on these Mamluk basins or if we look at this vessel which I only found online earlier this week and I don't it was on an auction web page I'm not being able to find anything more about it but this looks very strikingly similar to those jugs I've shown you from England so we can see this response to these distant objects and I think what interests me particularly is that the historical mobility of these objects especially those now in England represents a kind of complex facet in current discussions about repatriation of goods seized illegally in the colonial era these objects and their histories also expose the ways in which colonialism confronted soldiers and scholars with artworks and beyond Europe's borders or artworks that have been taken beyond Europe's borders and in fact although British antiquities certainly contributed to the nationalistic and Eurocentric discourses that characterize so much early art historical scholarship they also demonstrated from a very early date profound curiosity for objects from more distant lands as testimony to this concern we might consider so Christopher Wren's influential theory on the so-called Saracenic origins of Gothic architecture he thought the Gothic architecture had derived from the crusader experience of Islamic architecture all the collection and discussion of West African ivories as you see here so these were discussed for instance these probably made in Sierra Leone but discussed the very first meeting at the Society of Antiquities in 1731 or this horn owned by Sir Hans Sloane a very important figure in that kind of history of collecting in England so in so far as we can talk about the discipline of our history in Britain for example in the 1920s or 1930s even it's clear that it endured an impressively global dimension albeit one rooted in a colonial world view it was only after the collapse of European empires and the horrors of the Second World War the art historical horizons shrunk to an emphatically European dimension as scholars urgently sought to shatter nationalistic discourses by tracing the common roots of European Judeo-Christian civilization so I think an argument can be made that the emphasis on a kind of European history of art particularly emerges from especially from Jewish emigrate scholars like Owen Panolski and others who are seeking to find this kind of common European identity after the Second World War the objects I've discussed tonight tell powerful stories of Britain's interconnectedness with the medieval globe but let me be very clear that they're not representative of the majority of goods and artworks that were made gifted repurposed destroyed traded and treasured in medieval Britain these are and were exceptional objects they were not intrinsically precious but became so by virtue of the human and natural processes that created them their careful transportation across vast distances and their subsequent rarity they represent to some extent a bridge to an early modern world that was truly global and in which each of these objects might find its place in a cabinet of curiosities but with the exception of the narwhal tusk and as the past and treasure of slightly later here hints each of those objects might equally be used or displayed for great feasts of the kind that you see represented here were they jostled for attention with culinary marvels and later with the sugar tea wine salt and spices that tell their own contested stories of a global Britain thank you thanks Tom so much for a really wonderful lecture taking us through so many such a wide variety of object types not just in the examples you chose to focus on but kind of broadening out and linking them to so many other similar examples and I was thinking towards the end about the past and treasure so it was wonderful that you brought it up but and I know you talk about as the kind of first real global moment but so many of the objects you showed really demonstrate that world before the past and treasure but really that that there were so many elements of that already present in the material culture that was circulating in Britain at the time so we've got time for questions but as people are kind of gathering their thoughts both in the room and online I'm just going to jump in and and ask you something about the the the kind of remounting of some of these earlier objects that you showed and I was thinking a bit about how in museums today how potentially the acquisition of an object is about kind of pinpointing it's it's in a time and place say the Royal Gold at the British Museum you know we want this to be an object made for a French king in the late 14th century and and although it has these other histories they are kind of subsequent to this original history and I thought it was very eloquent the way that you kind of begun with the luck of Eden Hall and and finished really with those Mamlock basins and with the the jugs in Ghana because in a sense their histories in England or in Ghana kind of reject the object's origins and replace it in its remounting or in its metamorphosis and its reuse with these localized histories that are either particular to a family in the case of the luck or to a kind of ceremonial function and I don't know I wonder if you might say a little bit more about what you think about that about the the ways in which the metamorphosis thing of these objects kind of rejects history as much as creates new ones. Thanks it's an interesting question so well I mean one way I think to think about some of these objects is to see them as part of a kind of a long history of the repurposing of precious objects from all sorts of different places if you think about you know the the treasury at Sandini which reuses Sasanian rock crystal vases or Egyptian porphyry vessels and remounts them all if you think about the treasure of San Marco like again you have all these objects some of them Byzantine in origin some of them Fatimid in origin they get remounted I mean I think that's just what they did with these I don't think they were you know I have to say although it's I'm not sure that they knew where these objects came from and I don't think it really mattered I think they they recognize them as precious and rare and but what they have a kind of charisma in some ways that they start attracting all these stories like the narwhal tusks helping against poison it's the same with with seledon as comes to be associated with that it would show you if you kind of had a poison drink and so on the luck of Eden Hall I've talked about the kind of magical associations with that even the the English vessels that go to Ghana they seem to be used in these kind of sacred ritual contexts so there was a way that these exceptional objects which actually in their origins you know I said before these the seledons where is you know this is really quite standard stuff in 15th century northern China same you know coconuts for for many people around the world a coconut or a bit of ginger would be you know nothing remarkable but it's that movement and that's that process of transportation and metamorphosis which which endows them with value I mean I also think that because I went with Tom to look at some of these objects in Oxford and one thing we noticed looking at this object that you can't see in in images is that it's it's got this kind of underglazed decoration of a kind of foliate motif in it and there's something in the the closeness of the preciousness that's also really interesting about these objects these are clearly things they're not like paintings to stand back from and see at an altar they are objects to be very close to and and maybe in the case of the luck of Eden Hall to be shown by the person who owns it or something like that that there's a kind of intimacy around them too but not to hog too much of the the time I think we should open up for questions from the audience if there's anyone who'd like to to kick off if you just one second we're just going to get you a microphone thank you two very quick questions what is a heart case I hope it's not what it sounds like and and secondly the very last slide you showed what's going there's not that the matter with very colorful those very strange man in a blue dress okay I can try and ask though so a heart case is what it sounds like oh is it yes it was quite common to divide up bodies in the middle ages after death and Roger wanted his heart buried at St Albans thank you so he gets this special case we know that there were ambassadors with an embassy to the Mongol rule from St Albans in the early 13th century and this object which hasn't really been very studied very much actually well it has been suggested it comes from Spain I don't think anyone really knows but but it's a St Albans with a although it's a closed monastery of a mockery well connected to the wider world the last image I'm probably going to struggle more to identify these figures because I must confess to using it principally as an image of a what's going on on the front of that blue dress oh yes oh yeah I mean there's lots of you mean this nicely placed object well it's exactly what you think I mean it's not exactly I mean it's meant to imply exactly what you think I suspect it's meant to be the you know you could you could excuse it as a as a hilt of a dagger that's that's hidden behind but I think that these precious objects were there to delight but also to you know this there's an element of wit in them as well it's and it's not actually that uncommon to find um plays like that yeah thank you thank you a well placed question to lower the tone of the and a question here hi there thank you for that that was wonderful um the kind of object specific question the coconut cups that you saw in oxford I was wondering um what the interior of those were like were they um gilded or were they left raw and unfinished um well neither of those so they are they're polished up and cleaned up and they clear out all the um flesh um but they're not gilded on in the inside um on one of the new college um coconuts actually um I think it's this one there was a little I've gotten what it is now there was something at the very bottom but most of them you just see the inside of the coconut but it kind of cleaned up and polished and and smooth there is a suggestion that actually you having a slightly acidic wine in these coconut cups wouldn't be very wise um and and I think with all these questions with all these objects there was a question about uh which which I kind of wanted to get to with the um final image are these objects that are actually used um or are they objects that would be displayed in in the manner of these of this you know are these kind of exotic novelties I mean we know that that high table kind of feast a moment where you have culinary you know extraordinary kind of culinary delights you know peacocks and and sugar created into all sorts of kind of fantasies and those objects themselves have come from afar um the coconut cup I can't I don't I don't know yet basically I can't work out whether they were used I think they might have been used on the occasion but I don't think they're not they're not was sort of you know they're not dishwasher proof you don't use them on a regular basis I think they're really there to as a kind of display plate um would be my guess but I guess in the case here with with Jean-Duc de Berry he's extremely wealthy and he's also demonstrating his own personal wealth through the display of plate whereas the objects from the colleges are also kind of an index of the the people who have given all these and they're belonging to this institution and so they kind of are about binding that individual to the institution in life in death yeah I think that's right I mean a lot of these um so in a lot of the inventories from Etern and from new college and from other institutions you know they recall that they're given by former pupils or fellows um so these are these actors are kind of you know early form of alumni kind of advertising in a way um you know this is the way that you get to be remembered on high table um we know that those colleges also they have these big gaudet feasts I mean new college we have lots of records of them where you get all your patrons and your donors and your fellows together and you have these but also maybe in some well for new college you know the architects and craftsmen as well you get them together and you have this big feast and it's part of it's the way that you create a kind of a college identity um but it must be said that most of them don't record well at least the surviving ones don't have heraldry on them they don't record um who donated them we only know that from inventory records um but yeah I'm sure these these are in a way that I'm saying they're kind of these charismatic objects they they tell stories they're their objects that have stories associated with them whether they're mythical or or or not and so I think that they would be the prompt for kind of discussions about donors and and so on Jessica do you want to use my oh yes a yeah just a sort of broader question so one about in a way inspired by what you said at the end about uh you know these are these are all exceptional objects I mean they're more than one but they're not typical of the production and consumption of art in the British Isles during this period uh so I guess I just was wondering um what your thoughts might be about how to interpret something exceptional differently than something that is less so I in each case you might be talking about just one thing but how does it affect your um analysis of it the outside knowledge of its unusualness yeah uh I mean I think it's an important question it's something that I kind of grapple with because you know particularly in this in this current moment we were kind of drawn to these objects and and they I think they have been overlooked they don't they don't they haven't kind of fitted into kind of nowadays about relationship with far and so on but I think there was a danger that we that we misrepresent the history of the middle ages in Britain or anywhere else by by fixing all that I mean what what I hope to do with this is to kind of form a kind of corrective as it were to establish nowadays of what's happening in little medieval Britain but I but they they are a very incomplete story and I just think that they need to have that um that kind of cautionary tag I mean what is interesting um like Cassin Kennedy has recently published on on coconut cups and you know with not that much looking she's been able to overturn a a narrative that said that these were exceptionally rare just by looking you know you all these wills and things they were all published in the 19th century it was all there but no one was looking for it and so there was a way that this can kind of prompt you know they're good to think with but I think um I do think that some kind of we need to offer a kind of balanced view of what was that kind of total to you do we have any questions coming from online no not yet no they're very welcome yeah I was I was wanting to if you could tell us a bit more Tom about the you're talking about the fact that these for instance these eggs are being remanted and do the the particular decorative schemes within each of the individual mounts that you've got that you've been looking at do they tell very much of particular kind of skills and motifs in a particular area or in Britain for instance or do you see is there a kind of a is there a standard um set of conventions for doing these kind of mounts for these for these egg cups for instance or do they do they each of the mounts tell of a a kind of a an embracing of this particular object by a very particular culture with its own with its own imagery um so I mean I have to say I mean I've been looking at a lot of coconut cups recently and they're not quite as interesting as I want them to be like visually actually I mean some of them are like this one this is from new college uh and and is really exceptional and originally it would have had it's got we were looking at it a few weeks ago it's got these little holes it looks like we've had that little kind of bunnies running around the base but but but this is exceptional you know most of them are like this um and they're pretty standard it's the same kind of mount they use for ostrich eggs it's the same kind of mounts they use for the seledon um insofar as there's anything um particular about them I mean they are they are quite different and I I'm not sure why this is from the ones that are that are said to be made in Germany and elsewhere in central europe where a lot of them they're they're carving into the coconut but but I I wonder also if that's the kind of um assumption that under more scrutiny might kind of collapse um you know it's so difficult to know where any of these objects come from and there's so often the case you know we have all these inventories that record these coconuts but but they never it's very hard to match them up with with examples that do survive and so on so I um I think that the at least the um the one I mean the one way that we can locate some of those mounts is because they have hallmarks and so on so you know all of these examples actually can be dated relatively you know to a kind of 20 year period sometimes more precisely um uh but uh you know they're they're moderately interesting I would say these you know and they are they represent a considerable investment um um but there's not actually that much variety I would say in them but why aren't they interesting do you think why I mean I'm striking what is it about them that makes them uninteresting to you or frustrates what you want to do with them um so some of the ostrich eggs for instance you get from the uh all the northern shells like when you were in the 17th century you you have all these wonderful tritons kind of mounted on top of of nautilus shells you know the burly nests you know doing all sorts of interesting things they they're engaging there's a kind of um self-referentiality about the decoration of them uh all souls in uh oxford have a coconut cup an ostrich egg cup from the very early 17th century with a little ostrich mounted on the top they're they're kind of calling attention to the origins of these materials in a way that I find very interesting um but they're not doing that in the same way here I mean it's not fair for me to to uh condense that and they a lot of them you know from those eating inventory it seems that a lot of them had covers like you see here and and maybe those those covers would have uh had other kinds of uh imagery or whatever but um it's not I I am interested in them I mean I spent the last few months kind of obsessively collecting coconut cups but uh but yeah they're not they don't uh you know if you think about I can't think if in the past and treasure you see this but not much that much later they really become super fun but do you think it's also a kind of we talked a bit about this when we're putting together the series it's a bit about how the relationship to art art history has with these kinds of objects you know the painting by by petrus christie you can get completely lost in an object like that I mean it can occupy people for their careers thinking about single paintings and there are kind of limits to these coconut cups they can't quite possibly fit the the the gap left by a painting like that but then you know something like the fontel vase does give a bit more right you have patrons you have connections you have you know the 14th century there's something different about that that that's that's giving in a way that say the cups aren't because maybe they're a bit more common they they lack the they lack those paternal connections that that objects like that do yeah so I don't know maybe it is something about the way that we we are taught and the way that art history has been instructed and is currently still being constructed that yeah I mean I think I think um we we do need to think kind of outside kind of traditional paradigm for for understanding these and I think you know thinking imagining the the biography of an object not just actually something about the fontel vase from the moment of its production through you know Beckwith and so on you know all these interesting owners and its arrival in the national museum of Ireland it was lost so well you know so they these objects they have a very interesting biography and I think it's the same with something like the coconut cups or indeed gems I mean I think there is a way of tracing the biography of these objects not only from the moment their production onwards but actually you know for me I think is very interesting to to try to isn't backwards the kind of histories of extraction the growth of the cultivation let's say of coconuts or understanding more about gem mines in Sri Lanka in the 13th century you know this is material we absolutely just don't know anything about but I think these what these objects do is provide a way into those kinds of histories and and and open paths for for new research in that respect just just to stay with the metal mounds for the moment because we have some interest online as well just so we have a couple of questions but more or less they're asking about whether if we think about other cups and bowls so why do why do the porcelain bowls have metal mounts and can you sort of think about the coconut cups in relationship to other cups and bowls at the time what does that tell you so it's an interesting question but something like that sellard and bowl at new college was made as a bowl I haven't seen it out of its mount but I suspect it would sit quite comfortably as would a lot of these other objects and for all we know lots of the bowls and jugs that are now in collections in the UK and beyond might have arrived in Europe and the Middle Ages or the 16th century we just don't know it because they don't have their mounts you know we wouldn't know that about the the fontil vals if we didn't have this watercolor so I think while they're doing it you know in some cases to to protect them to keep them safe you know these are precious objects I think this gives them a level protection and stability some of them are cracked and damaged and vulnerable I think it's a way of signaling their importance they say it's what they do with with Byzantine and Roman and other kinds of objects sometimes it's about repurposing them so in the case of the fontil vals I've never actually seen it myself but you can see I mean here we have it as a vase here we have it as a jug and I so I don't know much about this I don't know if there's a hole for this spout so whether it's you know they are making quite radical changes in order to use these objects differently so I think we can't necessarily understand the kind of motives in all cases but I mean I would say having been slightly dismissive of some of these matters you know they are they are technically sophisticated you know what one of the challenges with these objects is that they're pre-made you know when they you get your coconut you get some vals you're engulfing as you've got to fit your mouth very very tightly to that you can't have it kind of wobbling around so you've got to find a means to set it very in a very stable fashion which is actually not that easy in some of the coconut cups you can see they've got this kind of hinge design that I think means you can kind of click them in and make sure that they are secure but but quite possibly they didn't they wouldn't need to to mount this but I think it's just there's a kind of accumulation of preciousness I suppose that comes from taking a precious object and then setting it in a kind of recognized another precious material also from afar do you think then the removal of the mounts from the frontal vals also speaks to a moment where the kind of triumph of this of the Chinese ceramic over the medieval says that it should be kind of you know preserved as it's because it seems I mean I don't know what did they take it off to clean it or something but you know they must be somewhere these mounts yeah that's a really interesting idea I mean it would certainly make sense that in the you would think that in the late 18th and early 19th century depending on exactly where this was after it leaves Fonhill that actually the vogue for Shinoiserie was greater than it was for medieval revival things although of course I mean interestingly you know Fonhill we think is a center of an interest in in the medieval but yeah I mean we can only speculate this this object is missing for about 100 years we don't know where it was or what happened to it but you know the guess is like so many objects that fall into hands of dealers they make a hunts group with those changes based on what they think is going to sell better so that would be a reasonable guess I think one yeah one more question actually two more questions but on coconut cups there's a question about the fact that a lot of the coconut cups look like chalices was there any intent to give a religious overture to these vessels so that's a very interesting question I think there are not from well you might not expect chalices to survive from England from pre-reformation that few do but not many there are a couple of examples from Central Europe that had clearly been made into chalices but most of them don't seem to have been and from again going back to the inventories of these kind of educational bushments you find them more in educational establishments than you do in church treasuries which I think is is interesting but but there is a I mean chalices there is that there is quite careful thought given to the materials they use for making chalices and for whatever reason perhaps partly because of this acidic wine these I don't think were very often used as chalices and it's the same with the Saladin and another kind of porcelain where so whether that was that stemmed some kind of pragmatic concerns or a kind of anxiety about these unfamiliar materials is not clear people you know on the other hand were did describe these kind of semi-magical powers to to porcelain and exposing poison and so on but maybe maybe exposing the Eucharistic wine to to that kind of level of scrutiny would be difficult to it's also a size question really because before the Reformation it's only the celebrant who is participating in the drinking of the the blood of Christ the wine so these are quite large vessels whereas most pre-Reformation chalices are actually relatively quite small and it's only after the Reformation you start to get much larger vessels to hold enough wine for the whole congregation was there another question yeah another one about the nautilus I think it's in a painting not yes yes exactly and I think the question is when when does that come in so I could talk about this with Lloyd recently so the earliest surviving example of so nautilus shells not as they only grow and they live in southeast Asia around kind of Indonesia and but they start becoming very fashionable in the 16th and 17th century onwards but there are earlier examples that survive from the 15th century I think they're recorded well are certainly recorded in inventories from the 14th century and the BM at the moment has a cover it's a kind of enameled metalwork cover that's in the very distinctive shape of a nautilus and it's suggested and it has the again it has heraldry on it that means we can date to the late 13th the early 14th century and that seems to have been made for a nautilus shell the shell no longer survives but if that is the case then I think that would be the earliest known example of nautilus of a nautilus in anywhere in Europe actually and it probably made in the cover probably made in in France and but perhaps with an English connection but they really take off so I'm more and more than certainly in Britain in the late 16th century and then onwards and they are wonderful you know things like the birdy nefs in the in the V&A they love the again it's these you know the materials of the nautilus shell they're a bit like porcelain or indeed other kind of precious stone sardonyx and things that are set into these cups they are they are materials that metamorphosize before your eyes they're not the exact nature the materiality isn't clear they shine as you look at them in different directions they look slightly different so these kinds of mutating materials I think are highly esteemed and there was an interesting connection I think as I said that that in the early these they call porcelain they they think of it as a kind of a shell and it has to do with this hard shiny surface I think in the same you know it's exactly the same reason that they or similar reason that they admired Spanish lusterware because in Spain they've learned it from Islamic craftsmen but they put in these tin glazes tin from Cornwall that happens but which gives it this kind of metallic sheen which is something that they couldn't do at that date in northern Europe I think we should bring the question part of this evening so close which leads me to just say thank you so much to everyone here for joining us and also to everyone at home for joining online please for those of you here come and join us downstairs for a glass of wine and also join me in thanking Tom again for his really wonderful lecture thanks