The poster for Henry II. © Reading Between the Lines.
Monday 8th October was the opening night of Henry II, the last in a cycle of three new plays about Reading Abbey and the dynasty who founded it, each focusing on a key historical figure: King Henry I, his daughter the Empress Matilda, and his grandson Henry II. The plays were commissioned from playwright Beth Flintoff, and produced by the enterprising Reading-based theatre company, Reading Between the Lines, with support from the Arts Council. The plays have been hugely successful, playing to packed and enthusiastic houses and receiving excellent reviews. The second play, Matilda the Empress, was voted one of the top new plays in Britain in 2017 in The Guardian’s annual poll.
I have been involved as historical advisor since the start of the cycle. I’ve provided contextualising notes for the programmes, talked about the historical context at public previews for the plays, done interviews about the plays on local radio, and took part in a programme for BBC Berkshire about Henry I, the founding of Reading Abbey, and the first play in the series. It has been a huge pleasure and enormous fun to work with such a brilliantly talented theatre group.
Magic, Medicine, Miracles: How Reading Abbey Helped to Invent Halloween
by Professor Anne Lawrence-Mathers
By Bill Nicholls, CC BY-SA 2.0. From Wikimedia Commons.
On Saturday 27 October, I had the privilege of giving a public lecture for the Friends of Reading Abbey, in the presence of the Mayor of Reading, Councillor Debs Edwards. The event took place in St James’ Church, sited amongst the ruins of the medieval abbey.
By Ron Baxter, from Corpus of Romanesque Scuplture.
The lecture explored the relationships between medicine, magic, and miracles in medieval culture, using examples from surviving books and records from Reading Abbey. For my grand finale, I suggested that the abbey played an important role in spreading the Feast of All Souls in England, and in creating the later-medieval ‘season’ of Hallowmass (leading towards Halloween). It was exciting to talk about all this while standing beside an elaborately carved stone, which was probably part of the abbey church itself.
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