 Mae ni wedi gael ei wneud, yn cwylwch ar y cyflwyniad cyfrannu, o'r cyfrannu cyfrannu, yw ei bod yn ei wneud o'ch gwrs ymlaen clywed am ymlaen, a'i gofio'r cyfrannu cyfrannu, i'r ddweud o'r cyfrannu cyfrannu o'r cyfrannu cyfrannu, ac yn ymlaen i ddweud y ddweud. Un o'r cwylwch yn gweithio'n gyfrannu cyfrannu o'r cyfrannu, ac nid oedd wedyn ni wedi'u fawr yn ymddangos yma, mewn cyfrannu cyfrannu cyfrannu ..a'r ysgolwydd a'r ysgolwydd Bryddon yn ymgyrchol yng Nghymru. Mae'r ystafell ar gyfer y llyfr yn ysgolwyddoedd yma.. ..y'r ysgolwyddoedd yma'r ysgolwyddoedd yma.. ..dechrau Jessica Berenbine a Dr Lloyd De Beyr. Mae'n ddod i'n ddod i'n ddod i'n ddod i Jessica a Lloyd.. ..egwyddoedd yma yma'n ddod i'n ddod i'r ysgolwyddoedd yma. Felly os yw'n ddod i'n ddod i'n ddod i'n ddod.. ..y'r ysgolwyddoedd yma yma yn ysgolwyddoedd yma yma a'r ysgolwyddoedd yma. Jessica yna ymgyrchol yma.. ..y'n llyfr, ymgyrchol ymgyrchol yma at yr unig fel Llyfr.. ..y Llyfr, bod hi'n fyddwn ni'n ffordd o rydymydd o'r Brgyfford growl.. ..er hynny'n ddod i'n ddod i'r ysgolwyddoedd yma ymgyrchol yma. gyda'r rhaid o gwbl, ac yn cymhwilol, ond mae'r ffordd yn fyddi gwybod a fyddych yn gwybod. Dyma'n rhaid i'r ffordd, ac mae'n rhaid i'r ffordd i'r ffordd. Mae'r chlywbeth, oherwydd Lloyd ac Jessica, yn ei gweithio i gydag o gymryd ymddangos i gydag o'r cwrs ac i'r themau, ac i gydag i'r rhwng cytrwpethau, fel genrys, gwirio ac enthysiad. A gydag o'r eich cyfnod, Jessica ac Lloyd i gydag o'r five themeau ..cymdeithas y 1953-19ледig fel ifaddol. Can you explain why these themes are so significant in medieval culture... ..as well as to our own understanding... ..of the Middle Ages and the History of British Art? After their talk, we will have up to a half an hour for questions... ...both from the audience gathered here, all of you here at the centre... ..but also from those of you participating online. For all those of you are watching online... ..please could you enter your questions in the chat box? ac mae yma'r swydd eich cyflwy discussions ar y cyflwynt yma yn gwneud y cyflwynt. Fe wnaeth amser nhw gwbod yw gandd догer ac ynchwil ein gweithio'r lechdal a'u cyflwynt hynny yn rhoi bwysig wrth lawer y gwaith yn y f nok o'r cylliddydd ac mae'r lechdal sy'n gweithio'r cyflwyntau sydd wedi unrhyw gofyn i gwneud ac mae'r cyflwynt ni i wedi creu hi fod. Roedd yna gwanodd i'r gyflwyno'r lechdal ywthinkant a'u bwysig i'r Brytyn i'r gwirionedd ar gyfer y g 축ol. yn y mewn gweithlwn. Rydyn ni'n edrych yn ei ddechrau. Rydyn ni'n meddwl i'n dda i'r ffordd, ddyn ni'n meddwl i'r gwaith. Rydyn ni'n meddwl i'r gwaith, ddyn ni'n meddwl i'r gwaith. A'n ddweud i'ch gweithio jesgeru gyd ac i'n ddau i'r gyrshaf i'r cyfrannu i'r ysgrif erbydd, ysgrif. Rydyn ni'n meddwl. Yn 26 deoedd, 2021, ym gyflawni'r cyfrannu meddl yn Deven, iawn o'r Ffarnland yng Nghymgyrch, o'r 25 mlynedd North-East of Exeter. Felly, rydyn ni'n gwneud y dyfodol. Felly, mae'r grwn wedi'i gwneud o'r cwyn mewn 2.3 cm yn diametr a'r gwneud o'r 3 grwm. Felly, mae'r dyfodol, mae'r 7 o'r gwneud o'r ymgyrch a'r ddweud o'r ymgyrch a'r ddweud o'r ddweud o'r ddweud o'r ddweud o'r ddweud. Mae'r ddweud o'r cwyn mewn ychydigol yn nhw'n rhan o'r ddweud o'r ddweud o'r ymgyrch a'r ddweud o'r ddweud o'r Gwein ym Mhwynt乐lyeches. Rhywethaf, mae'n gwych ar gyfer y sefydli ac yn y rhai hyn mae hyn yn ddau o'r du cyfysigallowdd a'r fath. Mae taethau yn ynhygoi ym 4 ymgyrch yn bryf yma o'r ddechrau a'r rhagion fathau. Felly, mae'n gweithio i gynnal gwynt wedi gwneud yng Nghymru, ond yma'r ysgrifennu'r cyffredinol i'r Llyfrgell, mae'r King Henry III o England a William of Glouster, yng Nghymru Goldsmith. Mae yna yn y ddechrau yma yma o'r 13 yma. Mae'r gweithio'r ddechrau wedi'i gweithio'r ddechrau'r ddechrau'r ddechrau'r ddechrau'r ddechrau'r ddechrau'r ddechrau'r Gwldsmith William yn y Glouster, yn ymdillog, yn ymdillog, ac yn ymdillog, ac mae'n ddiddordeb yn ysgolio'r ddechrau, mae'n ystafell roedd y diwethaf o Llyfrgell yng nghymru. Henry i'r gwrthydd i nifer oedd erdoeddwnnu'r Gweithlord, eu chwilio'r llai gynnwysиеis i'u llwyffol yng Nghymru, mae'r flynyddoedd a thef Cabinetauodd felly ac Ilyfrgell yn ymdillog i'r llwyffol yn ymdillog i'r llwffol bydd arall y ddefnyddio gymsig yng Nghymru, a'i gael eich roedd ymddillog, a yna'r holl o'r gweithio'r ddechrau'r Gweithlord i'r Llyfrgell. Mae'r gweithio'r coi yn ymdweud, yn gwybod i gyfnodol, yn ddiddordeb yn ddiddorol, ac yn ymdweud i'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ddechrau, gallwch yn gweithio i gyd yn gweithio'r bydd yn ymdweud a chyflwyddiad yn ymdweud, yn ymdweud o'r gwahau fawr, yn ymdweud o'r ffordd o'r gweithio'r gweithio. Yn y ddod y 13th yma, Henry began a mason gold to finance a crusade on the eastern Mediterranean. Documents from the king's own administration revealed the different types of gold that he was collecting, including foreign coins called Bezzans from Byzantium and others called Dinas minted in Mercia by the Amoravids, a North African Islamic dynasty who ruled over most of modern-day Morocco and southern Spain. Their gold was most likely bought across the Sahara from West Africa on caravans of camels. In the end Henry's crusade never took place and part of his gold collection was turned into this gold coinage, the first produced in England for several hundred years. This little coin made from African gold takes us all the way from sub-Saharan Africa to the Byzantine Empire, from the eastern Mediterranean back to England. When that lucky detectorist recovered the coin from the Devonshire soil where it probably laid undisturbed for 800 years, there is little chance he could have conceived of the journey it took to get there. So even this most diminutive of objects with its conservative imagery forces us to ask questions about the relationship between medieval Britain and the rest of the world. Once we start looking at objects and images in this way it opens up a multitude of possibilities, shifting our focus and changing the way we think about medieval art. Lloyd has given you a preview really of how far-reaching and yet how integrated these global connections are, that they've actually really literally seeped into the soil. So in this lecture we hope as conveners to open up the themes of this course and to give you a context for the more in-depth discussions from the lecturers over the next few weeks. Essentially what we hope to give you a sense of this evening is why it's important and how it all fits together. So first of all I'm going to take you through another work of medieval art very different from this one and that will allow me to introduce and in a sense to preview the five themes of the course as a whole and equally important to generate discussion of several questions critical to the course. What do we mean by Britain and the world? What do we mean by image and reality? And why have we chosen this topic for a public lecture course? Why does it matter? So this is a page from a manuscript, so a handwritten and painted book probably made in Ireland in the early 1300s. Like many medieval books it includes texts of various kinds and in this case more various than most. History, poetry, fiction, science, self-help, wise sayings, geography, religious stories, prayers and philosophy. And actually that's not even all, that's really just the main ones. So in this book also not uncommon for the period there are written in three languages, English, French and Latin. And the writing you see just a snippet of on the left here is the end of a text called in fact the image of the world which is then completed by this picture here. So the painting here that you see right there is this manuscript's version of a particular medieval image of the universe imagined as a sequence of concentric spheres. So at the center is the earth with a person digging and trees growing out of the soil. Then the waters with different kinds of fish and sea creatures here. Then the moon, then planets, then the sun, more planets. And then on the outside here what's called the sphere of the fixed stars. Outside of this structure moving it but not moving with it is the divine figure enthroned on a rainbow here. Blessing with one hand and with the other holding an orb. So much like the earthly king that you saw on his coin but this orb here is a little bit different. It's itself depicted to resemble a medieval map of the world which connects it to the spheres governed below as a kind of visual echo. And you'll be hearing more about medieval maps and the visions of the world they express in Professor Hyatt's lecture on the 22nd. So here I'm going to show you a close-up of the center of that image here. So I chose this painting for our introductory discussion because of the many ways that this picture and this manuscript can further open up the course's conversation about the medieval image of the world in both senses of the word image. That is image both in the sense of picture and in the sense of idea. Works of art like this one were a powerful method of disseminating ideas about the world and the viewer's place in it. So here indeed humanity's place in the world is rather ambivalent. On the one hand the human figure is at the center of the universe. On the other hand humanity's perspective is inverted disoriented. The upside down depicted person sees everything backward although of course the real person the reader of this book so the person with the view that you have now sees everything perfectly. And sees the reality that the artist is able to express. So if the painting here depicts an image of the universe's structure and the relationships of its component parts, what about the realities of the actual medieval world? How is that structured and organized? What were the relationships of that globe's component parts? How was it imagined and the theme of our course? What was Britain's place in it? So the manuscript here exemplifies some of those realities as well. A book written partially in an Irish dialect of English, partially in French, which was at that time spoken far beyond the borders of what's now France, and partially in Latin spoken and read more widely still. The relationships both among the component parts of the British Isles as well as between them and the rest of the medieval world were extraordinarily strong, intimate and complex. Very complicated. So this brings me to the question of why this topic for a course about British medieval art. Well, in even thinking about the concept of British medieval art one hits a staggering roadblock before one even begins. That is to say that there is no such thing as British medieval art. There was no United Kingdom in the Middle Ages and orienting research around art from places in what are now the modern nations of the United Kingdom and Ireland, inevitably it becomes a sort of anachronistic and in some ways an exercise that feels quite inorganic. So furthermore the terminology is painfully fraught as many of you I'm sure will be aware. So the phrase British Isles most obviously subsumes Ireland's independence, but the term British, even when used very self-consciously, excluding Ireland, is problematic as well in its own way. Now the reasons for this, so these sort of imperial implications of the term British become powerfully clear in light of a distinctive strand of specifically medieval mythological art and literature, which is called, went by the name, The Matter of Britain, and myth is the subject of Professor Bovey's lecture on the 14th. So you'll hear a lot more about that kind of area of medieval kind of cultural history that has so much bearing really on this course as a whole. So many recent scholars have tried valiantly to popularize other terms for the British Isles with phrases like Atlantic archipelago is one of the sort of more popular ones and other similar terms. But whatever their virtues, these terms just don't really seem to have caught on that much. And we'll hear a broader view of how scholars have reimagined and represented the medieval world for public audiences in Professor Majeed's lecture about museums on the 12th of May. But there's another very concrete reason why the phrase British medieval art fails to capture the reality of what it appears to describe. A great many works of art ended up elsewhere or were made for people here but originated elsewhere or were made here for people who themselves came from elsewhere or were made elsewhere by people from here or were made partially elsewhere and partially here. And that doesn't even cover all the permutations, basically every combination you can imagine. And this is something that both Professor Nixon and Professor Leister will address in their lectures, which are on respectively metamorphosis in the theme of movement. So the concept of medieval art simply essentially falls apart. It collapses as soon as it collides with even the most basic outline of these realities. So it became clear that the theme of Britain and the World was a possible focus for our course when we realized that we couldn't think of these problems as it were British medieval art, which are, after all, such an important part of the current national conversation. These problems as obstacles to the topic. They are the topic. The image and reality part of our course title is, although we do draw on the work of historians, literary historians, scholars of all disciplines really, ours is a course that addresses this specifically through the history of art. These are not just political and historical questions but aesthetic and artistic ones. Or art historical study has the distinctive potential to bring new understanding to them. So to that end, in the rest of our lecture, each of us will offer you two examples, so four works of art that engage with our course theme but in varying ways. And before we begin to talk about those examples, I just want to say a few words about the purpose, our purpose with these examples, what it is really that we aim to communicate with them. So the conventional wisdom that the Middle Ages was provincial in the extreme that most people never left the villages in which they were born is not without an element of truth. Many people did never leave their villages and medieval buildings that in our terms are very nearby one another can look very different because they're built out of different local stones. But as a total understanding of the medieval world, as it really was, this picture simply does not match the reality. Furthermore, and perhaps I would say actually even more significantly, it suggests this essential and really false opposition between local and global that has no basis in historical fact. The Middle Ages were both local and global. Some people never left their villages, others travelled farther than most people do today. A building made out of local stone could be furnished with works of art from around the world. A coin in someone's pocket could be made from gold mined 4,000 miles away. So this understanding of a global Middle Ages is very much the current consensus in the scholarship, but for the art historians among us, it can often feel frustratingly un-visual. Yes, we know the facts, but what does that mean for individual works of art? So that is what our examples are intended to illustrate. By no means do they cover everything, but through them you can begin to develop a sense of how this understanding of the medieval world affects our understanding of its art. The photograph on the screen presents us with a courtyard theme. We are looking at a grand building made up of a patched roof, columns, and a base level decorated with a raised design of various whirling patterns. Between the columns, mostly living in the shadows, are several seated and standing figures. Four African men dressed in traditional toga like kente cloths and a European here, shown carrying a staff and standing with one leg crossed over the other. The photograph was taken in 1887 and is currently held at the National Archive, but it originally comes from the collection of the British Colonial Office, cataloged as Views in Kumasi, quacadua, and his thoughts. This description helps locate us in West Africa in what is now modern-day Ghana, but it was then the capital of the Asante Kingdom. It is not possible to say with any certainty exactly where in Kumasi the photograph was taken, but it might be the courtyard of a royal palace belonging to Rula Premphe I. At the centre of the tree, its exposed root system rising out of the ground like a sinuous mound, located to the immediate right of the tree, positioned on the mound itself, are two remarkable medieval bronze jugs made not in West Africa, but in England in the late 14th century. Ten years after the photograph were forcibly removed by British forces during the Anglo-Asante War, this day, and are currently housed in different British institutions. The larger of the two, which you can see there, measures around 63 centimetres, is in the British Museum. It was acquired in 1896 from Charleson Legevarta, who served in the British Army during the Fourth Asante Expedition. It is an extraordinary object. Three circular layers of text in English around its bowl with various heraldic insignia. You can see these heraldic notes all over it, including the arms of an English king, which are just here. Possibly Richard II due to the appearance of a stag, his personal badge on the jug's lid. You might know Richard from his own appearance in the famous Wilton Diptych on display at the National Gallery. An image of a stag is painted on the reverse of the diptych. So this jug, made in the 14th century, potentially for an English king, somehow made its way to Ghana to become a treasured item owned by a West African ruler. At 49 centimetres, the second Kumasi jug is smaller and planer than the first, with few decorative embellishments, except for a shield below its spout added in the late 19th century. This has an engraved inscription that reads, Bronze urn presented to the officers 2nd Battalion Prince of Wales West Yorkshire Regiment at Kumasi, 17 January 1896, by the governor of the Gold Coast. Today this jug is in the possession of the York Army Museum, but on long-term loan to Leeds City Museum. When and by what means these jugs travelled to West Africa is unrecorded, but it is possible that they made the journey as early as the 16th century, by which time direct trade connections between Western Europe and West Africa had been established. This predates the formation of the Asante Kingdom, meaning that there were probably numerous other life cycles to these English-made medieval objects in Africa before they arrived in Kumasi. Dr Tom Nixon will be exploring these themes as Jessica has mentioned in further detail. He will be focusing on the jug at the British Museum in his lecture on the 28th of April through this theme of methods. Indeed, for these jugs, their place of origin might well have disappeared from view soon after they left England. Their African history is as integral to understanding them as is their English one. They should not be seen as separate but intertwined. But their 19th century removal from Kumasi during a period of British colonial occupation, and in one case their subsequent acquisition by a British National Museum, provokes us to think about how the geographic parameters of the Middle Ages have been constructed, especially in regards to the place of Africa in the border narrative. English objects such as these jugs, as extraordinary as they are, found in unexpected places, are often written off as outliers, thinking we can't understand them. They sit outside of the way that we think. But what if we placed them at the centre of how we sought to understand Britain's place in the wider medieval world, and what would that mean more broadly for the study of medieval art? These are not questions I aim to answer now, but ones we hope will linger throughout the lecture series. I'd like to move now from Kumasi to Rome, from Ghana to Italy. The images on screen show the façade and the nave of Santa Croce in Jerusalem, an ancient and important pilgrimage church in Rome, not far from the Basilica of St John Lateran. Around the same time as the Kumasi bronze jugs were being produced, that being the late 14th century, a group of English sculptures were about to make their own remarkable journey from England to Italy. Here are the carvings here. St Paul on the left and St Peter on the right, on display at Santa Croce, which has been there home for many centuries. Given their size and the remarkable skill of the sculptor responsible, the figures were almost certainly of the spoke commission. They are made out of alabaster, a beautiful grey-white translucent stone that became popular in Europe from the 14th century onwards. England was internationally renowned for the quality of its alabaster, which could be found in huge quantities in the English Midlands, particularly in Derbyshire and Staffordshire, and some of the earliest sculptors working in alabaster are connected with the Midlands region. Each carving stands around 115 centimetres in height, placing them among the largest freestanding English sculptures in alabaster. As we will see, the choice of St Peter and St Paul was meaningful for the Roman-based patron. Both Saints were martyred in Rome, where their relics still remain. The figures are highly individualised. Paul is shown thinning and bald on top, with long wavy hair tucked tightly into the cloakworn around his shoulders. His beard is made up of a series of individual corkscrew curls with a spiral moustache resting on his upper lip. Traces of an orange-yellow pigment indicate that his hair was once brightly gilded. He has an aged and weathered face. The anxious creases carved into his forehead and around his eyes must once like his hair have been accentuated with pigment. This is true too of Paul's eyes, which now appear vacant that were originally painted on. In his left hand he holds an open book, positioned with delicate fingers, and in his right hand he balances at his feet a large broad-bladed sword. He is dressed in secular clothing, shown wearing a wraparound cloak, gathered up under his left arm, the drapery falling in a series of beautifully rendered photos. It remains elsewhere as hard to detect at the naked eye, but it was probably richly polychromed. The sculpture of Peter on the other hand is not fared as well as poor. There is a major break across the neckline and his chin, nose, hair and headgear all show signs of damage. In contrast to Paul's secularity, Peter, Prince of the Apostles, is shown wearing the clothing of a bishop. He is beardless and his hair is short, shown as a series of individual twisted locks. On his head he wears a special hat called a mitre, combined here with the papal tiara, a crown with the repeating design of large flowing leaves. Around his left arm hangs two keys and in his left hand he carries a model of a church, a reference to the fact that Christ makes Peter the rock on which the church is founded. So how did they get to Rome? In 1382 a papal tax collector called Cosmato Gentilis was granted a special licence from King Richard II of England to transport three large alabasters of St Peter, St Paul and the Virgin Mary from Southampton to Rome. This was the very same English king whose eraldic shield appears on the Camassie von Jug at the British Museum. The licence was a coup for Gentilis. It exonerated him from paying any customs duties on the value of the sculptures. As tax collector Gentilis was not simply a low level lucky of the current Pope Urban the Sick, he was also papal chaplain, held a licentiate in canon law and was papal nuncio in England. Thus the king might well have wanted to carry favour with the Pope's trusted representative, a wise move as Gentilis went on to become Pope himself as Innocent VII. It is also likely that Richard might have known Gentilis personally. In a letter sent following his return to Rome the king addressed him as Beloved Friend. At some point after returning to Italy, Gentilis presented the alabasters to Santa Croce to which he was appointed Cardinal Priest in 1389. The expense of transportation, his retention of the carvings over several years, as well as his subsequent donation, all suggest that Gentilis was attached to these images, a reminder perhaps of his time in England for which he seems to have retained an affinity. However Gentilis' licence only provides evidence for the movement of sculptures out of England. There are no clues as to who made them or how, when or why they were acquired. These questions remain open-ended. Why of all the various different object types he encountered did Gentilis choose to return with these alabasters? Did he commission them himself or were they a gift? Gentilis' work collecting papal taxes took him across the country. We might think of this as his very own British grand tour on which he likely encountered the work of English sculptors in Alabaster, where he went and what he might have seen remained conjecture, but perhaps he visited Gloucester Cathedral, then an abbey, with an alabaster tomb of Edward II located in the ambulatory at the east end. Or he might have made his way to St George's Chapel Windsor and taken in the great alabaster rherodos made by Peter the Mason of Nottingham that now no longer survives. At Durham Cathedral did he see the newly built stone screen behind the high altar containing over 100 alabaster statues, including the Virgin flanked by St Oswald and St Cuthbeth. He might even have seen the work of foreign sculptors in Alabaster, such as the tomb of Philip of Hainorth made by Jean de Liers and stored next to the Confessor's Shrine at Westminster Abbey. Situating Gentilis' carvings alongside these other, roughly contemporary sculptures helps locate them. His alabasters are not simply exported products as they have been characterised in the past, but are among the best-preserved English sculptures on the continent. No other 14th century document so comprehensively connects a European patron with a group of surviving English sculptures as does Gentilis' licence to export. But his case was surely not a one-off. Other fine medieval English sculptures located on the continent were probably originally exported in similar circumstances. The three sculptures you see on screen in Alabaster in England around the same time as Gentilis' Roman carvings. All of these ended up being taken abroad. The Virgin and Child on the left is previously in St Trudyn, Belgium. The image of St Catherine at the centre is in Paderborn, Germany. The sculpture of doubting Thomas to the right is in Gdansk, Poland. The story of their journeys, or the stories of their journeys abroad, are, like the Camassie Ron's jugs, much harder to recreate the same level of historical detail that we can bring to the figures of Peter and Paul in Rome. These other sculptures have also been treated essentially as outliers. To continue in this way is to ignore the fact that England's artistic, as well as mercantile and political connections in the Middle Ages, were truly expansive, in this case taking us all the way from the Alabaster quarries in the Midlands to the Low Countries in Germany all the way across the Baltic coast and down the Adriatic Sea. This is a memorial image for someone called Jean-Blaude Well. It's made of brass. What I'm showing you here is not brass itself. It's what's called a brass rubbin, so that is an impression on paper. These times are very low in these metal sculptures and they're totally difficult to photograph. It's the best way of brassing their design as opposed to their materiality. It means it makes them look a bit like prints. So you might just keep that in mind. These rubbings, like if they are prints, made using the brass and you'll see a picture in a moment of the brass so you can go and see what that looks like. But I'll use this image to talk to you a little bit about the design as well as the images as well as the text. So the description around the outside had the details of the design. His name, Jean-Blaude Well, the fact that he was blind and the date of his death on the 16th of April 1462 when he was probably in his 80s. He lived a long time, another piece of conventional wisdom that's not entirely true. In the center is a figure of Blaude Well himself, see here, with his hands clasped. He's wearing an extremely elaborate robe so that's all those details are what you see there. And he's depicted under an architectural canopy. And one of the particularly wonderful aspects of many objects from this period is their immense enthusiasm for depicting other works of art in other media within themselves. So what seems probably to be represented here within this piece of metalwork are embroidery, so this kind of embroidered robe, microarchitecture, miniature architecture, architectural sculpture and in the elaborate clasp to the robe other pieces of metalwork. The figure is standing in the architectural niches here so you see the figures there, there and there and there are images of saints. So you see John the Baptist, John the Evangelist, the Apostles Peter and Andrew, the Bishops, Aceph and Nicholas and Saints Bridget and Winifred. There are also figures depicted or rather depicted as embroidered here and you see the standing figures here all down this robe. And these are archangels, Michael and Gabriel, Saints David and John of Beverly, Thomas of Haraford and Chad and Catherine and Margaret. So the details of particularly which saints actually are important because as I said this image in metal depicts images of people in stone and fabric and Bloodwell himself and actual human being. These other figures are sort of an interesting mix of those who were venerated by Christians of the world at that time, Europe, Asia and Africa and it combines those with some holy figures whose cults were more particular to the British Isles and finally there's a significant delegation of holy figures who are special to Wales. So that's Asaph, Winifred and David. And so the reason for this becomes clear in light of the inscription below so this text here and this is very unusual inscription in terms of both its text and its artistic technique. And what I'm going to show you next is a photograph of the brass itself of this detail here. There you go. Okay. So and I'll talk to you a little bit about what this says and sort of how it kind of bears on the theme. So the inscription here has the text of a kind of dramatic dialogue. It's sort of, it's almost like a kind of play script, a dialogue of two voices which begins with John Bloodwell himself speaking directly. So that's this text here saying is, Wales gave birth to me, Bologna taught me law, Rome gave me experience and five nations gave me their languages. So what he means by this is that he was born in Wales, he studied in Bologna, he worked in Rome and he spoke five languages and three of them would have been Welsh, English and Italian, almost certainly another one of them would have been French and he would have known Latin as well probably means another modern language but not entirely noon. So these are the words depicted in sculptural relief, so raised lettering in the first two lines. In the third line, another voice breaks in and another technique. So it's incised, so the ground is raised and the lettering is incised, so there's another voice breaks in and also how it's actually done is interesting. So this other voice chastises Blogwell for showing off about languages, experience, law degree and reminds him that mortal life is brief and that the gifts of that life, not only money but also reputation are ultimately empty. So the brevity and vanity of life on earth, this is a perennial theme in medieval English poetry and art but this poem is distinctive in a number of ways. It calls attention to the geography of the earthly and heavenly realms and the subject's trajectory in life from one to the other. But just as much, if not more so, it calls attention to the geography of the earthly realm itself, within itself and this person's journey through that world, Wales, Bologna, Rome and finally England where this is located. In the illusions to Blogwell's professional reputation there are echoes of other places as well where he travelled and this is known from record sources archival sources. So he travelled to a number of other places in the course of a very successful academic legal and diplomatic career. He spent time in what's now Germany and Spain and almost certainly in other places as well. So strikingly, the opening words Wales gave birth to me are also a direct and very recognizable literary reference to what's called the Virgilian epitaph. So this is the traditional epitaph attributed conventionally to the ancient Roman poet Virgil begins in much the same way but with different places. Mantua gave birth to me and Calabria took me away. And so the text of this memorial also signals its subject's membership and what we would now call an international intellectual community. So my second example like Lloyd's first one also begins in the Colonial Office Archive and the National Archives in Cew. So the image here is from an early photograph in one of the Colonial Office photography record series and it's an image of Belepe's Abbey which is near Carinia in the north of Cyprus. Cyprus is a place usually associated with Britain's modern global empire but in fact medieval British Isles and medieval Cyprus have long standing connections human, political and artistic that go back actually much farther. So for example King Richard I of England conquered Cyprus which had strategic potential in the context of medieval that is say crusading as well as modern imperial and colonial activity. So he was married in Limisol and his conquest of Cyprus he captured a battle standard that he then gave to the great Abbey of Burris and Edmonds in Suffolk so material connection there. There were other ongoing artistic connections as well between medieval Britain and Cyprus and some of these involved the exchange of design ideas as well as in the case of the battle standard actual objects. So there were sort of ideas visual culture images as well as actual material culture going between the two places. Some of these design comparisons have long been noted but many substantial connections are really only recently beginning to be discovered so very exciting research that scholars are doing in this area. For example in the cloister of the Abbey of Belipais which you saw in the image from the colonial office record in the last slide and I'm showing it to now just in a more recent photograph. So Belipais was an abbey of what are called primonstratensian cannons. That is to say these are priests living together in a convent community so sort of like monks essentially like monks for all intents and purposes here. Their cloister here was constructed in the mid 14th century and you can see over here the remains of stone work beneath the arches which seems to have been added somewhat later say in the third quarter of the 14th century so sadly as you can see a lot of it's gone but there is enough that remains to get a sense of what was once there. So these kinds of stone decorations tracer patterns are often highly intricate and very distinctive almost like fingerprint you could think of it sort of that way. The tracer designs here so it's recently been noted, been worked out that they correspond particularly closely to English models and the most likely explanation is that artists from England worked here in creating the stone work for Felipe. So our final image or my final example has brought us back full circle to the eastern Mediterranean a catalyst for Henry's project to amass African gold to mint this coin that ended up in the ground in Devon and in conclusion we would like to end with this object where we began as a kind of emblem of how much of the world can be as it were densely concentrated but profoundly kind of packed into even a very small medieval object. What we hope our introduction here has shown are some of the ways to kind of expand that so it's concentrated in these objects and what we hope we've done is kind of expand it outward again in opening up these individual works for interpretation and in turn to bring those interpretations to bear on our own understanding of the medieval world. Maybe we should leave our coin up here. So I think if I can ask if both Steng and Lecton viewers so the viewers can see and so the first thing to do is to invite members here at the PMC to ask them questions you'd like and then we'll also have the opportunity to relay questions that you might be getting online as well and for all of you who have been watching online please submit questions we'll certainly relay them to Lloyd and Jessica and we'd really like to welcome you to however open and open ended those questions are they'd be very appropriate for the beginning for the course like this one but first of all I want to say huge thanks to both for opening up what looks and really I mean a question to ask you to begin with is is the kind of work that you're doing in this course that you're obviously pursuing in your own research does it offer quite a challenge to the ways in which the the art history of medieval Britain has tended to be that has been done over the last decades or is it part of a much broader and longer development to see in this thing? I mean it's a very interesting question because I think do do objects like the jug at the British Museum bend to art historical methods and often as Jessica alluded to with the sense of how the global turn in well in all of our history really sometimes feels un-visual because what is it exactly that at the core of it how do you interpret these objects and sometimes you end up doing a straying into a history of trade or straying into areas where say the way that you've trained as an art historian are difficult to match with the objects that you'd like to bring into your field of study so it's a challenge but I think that and we'll see the other lectures in this series how they respond art historians that's something we all talked about very much at the beginning that centering art history in this was something that was really important The only thing I would add to that I suppose is that I feel like in a sense it has an element of a return to very early practices in the field of the ways in which antiquaries were in some ways very passive and open to their sources and they just kind of if it was there it was there as opposed to kind of creating hierarchies of certain types of works are at the top either because of their medium or because they fit a perceived norm or that they seemed at the centre that we might now think of at the constructed centre rather than the periphery of art historical study so in a sense it's a deconstruction of hierarchies of medium and of geography that not in all ways but in some ways is in tune with some very early ways of studying the history of these objects Thank you, questions so I think we have Nerman here who can have a question from online from Robert Gifford who was wondering if the exchange of objects was two way I think he's referring specifically to the jugs that you mentioned and if they had arrived perhaps from the slave trade That's a fascinating question because the simple answer is yes but what predates the jugs production in England and their ultimate movement to West Africa is the fact that in Western Europe rulers the elite were desperate to get hold of materials that came from sub-Saharan Africa thinking obviously of gold and ivory as the main materials but also animals there was an elephant in London in the 13th century as many of you know from Matthew Parris's drawing that could have also come from Asia and there are ostriches I mean the Prince of Wales we know the two-pence piece in our pocket has ostrich feathers on it and that was adopted by the black prince the son of Edward III in 1344 so you start to see that these things that we somehow take for granted are actually connected in a much larger way but what I should say is that this desire for West African materials or rare luxury materials wasn't about taking from Africa you know in a sense the great trade network that existed in the middle ages was really between West Africa, North Africa and the Islamic East and Europe was desperate to kind of get in on the game the West African kingdoms were the major players many of you will know the story of Mansa Musa, the emperor of Mali who was so wealthy that when he went to Mecca he shifted the entire price of gold in Egypt cos he gave away so much gold on his journey and he's depicted on European maps you find Mansa Musa depicted so to what extent can these objects also help us think about the perception of West Africa, North Africa the Islamic East through thinking about thinking about that point through these objects Any questions from the floor here that you'd like to pose to Lloyd and Jessica in relation to their question we also have more from online but just maybe to hope to hear any questions that you'd like to ask at the stage Yes I don't think it's a content list it's image attributions So those are the photo sources in National Archives photos of ourselves, mixes and things those are the sources for the photograph Not a very exciting slide Are you writing something down? You can feel free also to ask us if you want to know something to know about any of what happened I actually have a question about an image Carol Martin is asking what was the sepia colour image that was shown early in the presentation when Jessica was speaking about the false opposition of global and local Ah yes, okay I Let me just make sure this is the one you're talking about That is a much enlarged detail of this our sort of map dot image which is a map called it's normally the name of the Hereford World Map so it's a large map which is in Hereford People which is one of the sort of most kind of thrilling medieval objects and one of the most famous at least among medievalists maps from the medieval period and I'm not sure is Alpha High going to speak about this I don't know if he'll speak about this one in particular but he will speak a lot about kind of these kinds of certain images and the role of the kind of the role of geographical literature and art in constructing a world picture Can I ask a question about those two jugs in that photograph in terms of their place this, yeah, thank you in terms of their placing here I mean I was just really struck by their juxtaposition with the roots of this tree and what you make of that amazing kind of relationship that seems suggested there about whether that is an important place for these jugs to be placed or is it a kind of a rather accidental place in which they might have been would be great if you could tell us a bit more about this astonishing kind of visual conjunction of these roots and that tree and these two jugs and what you might make of it I mean here this is not my work as such as Raymond Silverman who worked on the importation of luxury metalwork into West Africa in the 14th, 15th and 16th centuries as part of a PhD in the 1980s and he's recently republished some of this recently or done more work on it and what he did is, so let's say for instance these English objects have always been seen as kind of what are these things and why did they get to Africa and what he looked at is there's quite a lot of very high end metalwork in West Africa mainly imported Islamic metalwork Mamluk copper basins often with textual inscriptions on them and so if you think about the Santi Jug at the British Museum with that great big textual inscription on it and this is obviously these copper objects have moved to a culture that values bronze casting so the sophistication of these objects I think is highly recognised by the people who cared for them throughout the centuries after they arrived in Africa copper is not as widely accessible in West Africa as it is in Europe so that's the other move of materials copper, salt going south, gold, ivory and textiles going south as well what Raymond worked on was to see that a lot of these objects are found in high status environments so courtyards in connection with certain rituals of pouring libations into the vessels and so here next to this tree which is clearly a very old tree in the centre of a very highly decorated courtyard means that there's some relationship between the objects the tree and ritual that is now slightly lost at least to us looking at this photograph but what Raymond did is look at some of the memories of the associations of how these kinds of metalwork objects came to West Africa and often they have these incredible stories attached to them and how they appeared out of nowhere and all kinds of things that from an anthropologic point of view are really fascinating but so I think it's there's no accident here the placement, the location the material the object all tied together to reveal this multi-layered history of these of these objects in there and their place here Can I just add something about the image and the colonial office photographs in general we both used them in a sense by coincidence but both of us are very interested in this record series which is of course not medieval but it is sort of a fascinating archive or piece of an archive within the National Archives from the point of view of a medievalist because even if you've never seen images before you have a sense of what's behind some of the way some of the image of them or the sense of them that has kind of come down to us culturally in the 20th and 21st centuries so it's been very kind of eye-opening I think from a medieval point of view I don't want to speak for both of us but to look through this series and kind of think about how they present all kinds of things but in particular kinds of objects that we kind of look at as medievalists You can lose many hours because the National Archives have digitised to put them all on flicker and you can lose hours going through the flicker folders You can spend many hours of your day So a question that if you just wait for your microphone Just a very simple observation probably incorrect but in the very first image it looks upside down Could we return? Wait, where we see Yes, you see the man in the middle So is that upside down? So you see, it's a little bit easier so you can see here the whole page So this sort of human figure is depicted in the earth here and then the figure is depicted so the divine figure is depicted oriented right side up and then the human figure is depicted is central but kind of upside down and in reverse and that I think is sort of this image is a whole you will and you may well have seen versions of this other places but it's one of the things that makes it particularly interesting On one leg? Not exactly So it's a little bit hard to see but here's one foot and then here's a shovel and then the other foot is pressing down on it to push it into it Excellent, thank you very much No problem Religious or philosophical really So just in cosmological terms this image of the universe or of the world is a sort of picture of the order of things which is governed externally by what's called the prime mover so the divine figure causes everything, the first cause causes everything to happen and I suppose you could call it philosophical or religious but it's a conception of not just people's place in the world but the place of everything each thing relative to each other and the sort of reasons why things happen the way they do so it's sort of a picture of not only the interrelationship of parts but the interrelationship of actions and the source of meaning and the source of things happening in the universe that makes it quite abstract Hi, so a question from Simran Verdi Is the modesty almost required in a medieval sorry, is the modesty almost required in medieval art due to the need to enforce the divine hierarchy of the medieval world God, then kings, then all underneath them might this stem from the church desiring to maintain power if all of your talents are given to you by God and are fleeting then surely you must remain modest lest you be punished and thus are controllable Referring to this one Yeah, so I suppose the sort of that the respect in which this text and is conventional as opposed to the way in which it's unusual is on this sort of emphasis on the kind of fleeting and momentary nature of human life and the way in which it's sort of but a moment in the context of the world and to remember that everything that you see or have in life is only temporary and is only empty and there may be things about this poem absolutely that are distinctive and I did sort of mention a few of those but there are some things that you will find in many places and that were if not everywhere then one of the kind of really central and you know themes if you want to call it religious you could call it philosophical and central parts of the way in which at least some aspects of the society saw their place in the world but also their place in time and their sort of role of the benefits of our free life I mean there's also a sense that these types of objects if you wanted to put them in a category they often speak to you and they often say things like you know I was so great in life and I had palaces and I had all this money but now I'm just rotting flesh in the ground and I'm nothing and so here there's a sense of this guy kind of bragging I do all this stuff and it's like hang on, wait a minute remember you're nothing but of course there's incredible irony because it's very expensive monuments and there's this sort of profound irony of these epitaphs talking about how earthly life is fleeting and these material things mean nothing in gold I want something that says money means nothing and I want it in gold like that's what it is Actually on that note do you know if this would have been commissioned when he was still alive or was it something that somebody else did for him after he died So I would say almost certainly while he was still alive there are some examples of the latter so for example there are some things like this that are made quite a long time after the person has died presumably by family members or heirs but this one was almost certainly commissioned and designed during his lifetime Yes a question here now Thank you, could you just run through again what the themes are coming up, I can remember myths and maps but I've forgotten the others Myths, maps Metamorphosis, movement museums Five M's Five M's That was actually completely unintentional it just happened to me Medieval, alliteration Great we have another question from an online view Yes an anonymous attendee asked is there any particular reason places are depicted in miniature like in the church being held in the alabaster and the small orb echoing the bigger diagram of the world Well I guess on a practical note he couldn't hold a very big church so do you want to take the globe one? Yes I mean it's actually it's actually not a sort of straightforward question to answer as it might seem because it sort of gets at the medieval way of depicting things and way of representing things so it's in some ways quite straightforward to say what is depicted, a person holding a miniature building but to explain why would have to sort of take in one of the ways in which medieval kind of representing works as a kind of mode of you know visual expression and I suppose if I had to kind of characterize it I would say that it's although there can be elements of it that are memetics in some cases very much so like on these wonderful sculptures with sort of wrinkles under the people's eyes hairs the way in which the drapes are supposed to fall sometimes very strongly in the medical quality but in other ways their mode of representation is extraordinarily symbolic and abstract and you will often see say donors of a church the people who were the benefactors who gave money for a church to be built or an abbey holding the building and handing it over and in a sense you have the person depicted and the building depicted but the relationship between them is being depicted in a way that is highly abstract and symbolic and the relationship among the objects depicted is not one that's visual it's one that's conceptual Is that a papal crown or what is it as the Bishop of Rome I think it's both at the same time so he's he appears as Bishop of Rome but he's got the papal tiara which sometimes is represented as a triple deca crown yeah in this case not I mean I think that for us watching and listening to your talk I mean it must think wow this is an astonishing way of doing your work but it's incredibly challenging you're being out you're looking at objects that have travelled you're engaging with cultures that are far flung that are no doubt often very new to you in terms of doing research on and I just wondered whether the kind of work that you're both doing and that this whole course is suggesting is it will both on the one hand require an amazing amount of collaboration between scholars I mean the global turn not only in relation to the subject matter and the way of doing things but also working, collaborating with scholars from around the globe to make this kind of work happen and I'll also be really interested you mentioned the flicker archive of the colonial office photographs whether the digital is really allowing this kind of work in a way that may not have been the case 50 years ago whether that sheer abundance of newly reproduced and available imagery is helping you do the kind of global work as it were that you're able to do now and maybe in the way that these kinds of talks can also be accessed by people in lots of different places I mean I think there is a problem with lots of research and funded research and the outputs remaining in Western Europe or North America so there is a problem about how you meaningfully engage globally through the kinds of research that you want to do yes I think the digital and the access to images and that kind of thing have a huge part to play but just taking one step back from your question about the kinds of objects and difficulties I mean one thing if you're a medievalist looking at the kinds of objects we've selected we've actually selected some of the most kind of nerdy of all medieval objects brasses, coins alabaster sculptures I mean the bronze jugs kind of sit outside a little bit but you know we haven't got a kind of fantastic painting you know the kinds of object types we're looking at here are kind of nerdy but the idea of brass rubbing is the kind of thing that people do you know there's a whole society dedicated to it basically so there's something interesting I think also I don't have a massive point to make of that but just our choices and we've marked them as what we've selected to talk about we haven't gone for the like super fling stuff particularly and I think I suppose part of the reason for that is that the object of the structure we wanted a sort of range of things engaged with the questions in a different way and also the sorts of things that we could really kind of people might not normally see in books some of them are in books but not not often but also where we could really kind of take everybody kind of into it by stages with us and I think that that sort of governed a little bit those points and as far as the way in which the technology kind of enables that is that you know very good very good digital photography makes it easier to talk about those details and that kind of makes a big difference I think this sort of ideal way of conducting the research kind of in sort of logistical terms in terms of those challenges is sort of I mean I think of it as almost toggling back and forth between you know the materiality of it and the visuality of it and the materiality that requires you know and actually kind of walking around the cloister and seeing how it all fits together or you know sort of looking at the you know looking at the material of the alabaster and seeing like what does it actually like how does it respond to light and also being able to see kind of volume of images that digitisation allows one to do to grasp kind of broader patterns in terms of design obviously one problem I think with digitisation is you know we've looked at these colonial art as photographs but we haven't held the photographs and the notes written in pencil on the back of these things I've seen the Cyprus ones I haven't seen the ones that you showed I've seen the Cyprus ones actually the interesting thing about them is they're sort of now in albums and they do have kind of hand written notes on them and it is quite interesting to see what they say because then you have you've kind of plunged into the material world kind of 19th and in some cases very early 20th centuries and it's quite a different one and it's impossible to kind of look through the image of the object like you feel very much there with photographs but I haven't seen the ones that you showed so you know I've seen them more in books so I connect them much more with the objects they represent than with their archive context Right we might have questions one I think we might have time for one or two more questions before we wrap up Perfect Oh it's not a question it's really a question I'm doubting Peter I mean doubting Thomas it's amazing for the colour and it's interesting the way the hair is that yellow and there are traces of it that are very much like the support Oh yeah I mean that's the beard of the Thomas and the hair of the Thomas Yeah I mean This sculpture, this one in Gdańsk and two others there were in the porch of St Mary's Church in Gdańsk which if you know it is one of the most important churches in the Baltic and these English sculptures were in the porch there and they said no one knows about these sculptures no one knows about any of these sculptures they really do not feature at all and there's a resident English merchant a population in Gdańsk from the mid 14th century there's all these interesting connections but they're surviving polyphony because often the ones in England don't survive this, match the pieces most of them but they don't survive it It's in the National Museum in Gdańsk or the museum and these are one of the things you're recovering a movement of objects and goods and artists from England across the global networks in a way that maybe we're not used to a kind of granular mapping is something that people well I don't know I don't know what the audience think what do you think about when you think about British or English or Welsh or Scottish or Irish medieval art, what comes to mind I think the prevailing view that we hint at in our texts on the website is about perceptions of insularity and separateness and that's obviously motivated by some brief feelings about the UK's relationship to the rest of Europe that's not a problem in the Middle Ages it's a very different world that coin of Henry III his father, John, held territory in empire is stretching from the Scottish borders down to the Pyrenees that's a very different concept of England at least relationship to the world and maybe one last question thank you do you subscribe to the view that the renaissance wasn't a radical move forward from the dark ages that's some quotes I know some scholars have argued that there shouldn't be a scholarly break at the beginning of the early modern period that is a wonderful question and of course I did realize as I was speaking that we discussed the implications of everything and of course we didn't talk about medieval the Middle Ages, that's the one term that we couldn't deconstruct everything in one talk it's very hard to give a brief answer to that question I certainly would question the idea of a sort of radical and total break at a particular time as I think probably most people would the way I prefer to think of medieval and renaissance is not as time periods as chronological periods where there's an end of a certain day or a certain year or a certain even decade but more as cultures that renaissance is a kind of is a sort of cultural movement that could coexist with medieval culture what we think of as medieval culture rather than being a chronological epoch that is just about the shortest answer I can give to that question but I could absolutely talk about it for hours I will turn away I think we might end there but just to say that I once was given a medical procedure which required general anaesthetic and the anaesthetists realising that I was an art historian as we were walking to the operations theatre just having put in the anaesthetic said so what is the difference between the medieval and the renaissance and I started talking and I instantly went out instantly we took me back to to knock anybody out right thanks so much to both of you for an amazing introduction I'm so excited about the rest of this talk a series of talks and I really hope all of you will come back and follow this programme it's a really exciting one all of you have been watching online we really look forward to welcoming you back on a weekly basis as this course unfolds and we'll be getting ever more richer layers of interpretation and commentary on this topic so many thanks to you both for the course and for those of you here at the PMC I can now welcome you to a reception that we're going to be hosting downstairs thanks to everyone involved thanks especially to Nermin Abdulla the person who's in charge of our public lecture programme and our learning programme in so many ways to Sri Hadejays also part of the team here and to everyone else including Bryony Bok Rhai Rans is helped out tonight but thanks everyone and see you all again soon thank you