One of the skills required of any good historian is the ability to listen. For those working on oral history projects that means quite literally hearing their subjects speak. For the rest of us it is a case of ‘listening’ figuratively to the ‘voices’ that echo through the texts and objects that constitute our primary source materials. In recent years, the profession has made great strides towards learning to listen in new ways, both by hearing once neglected voices from the past, such as those of transgender individuals, and by listening to contemporary concerns like the #MeToo movement.
These are welcome developments, but there remain other voices to which the historical profession as a whole can still seem a little deaf. One reason for that is the very limited diversity of our profession.
Royal Death and Burial: Reading Abbey in Context
by Prof. Lindy Grant
Paul Sandby, Abbey Gateway, painted in 1808, from Wikimedia Commons. The original is in Reading Museum.
It takes a real effort of the imagination to see the past glory of Reading Abbey, founded in 1121 by King Henry I of England as his intended burial house, in the battered remains surviving today. But Reading Abbey was one of the great monastic institutions of Europe in the middle ages, an intellectual and cultural powerhouse, with a magnificent church and richly decorated monastic buildings, a great library (King John kept his books there), and international connections.
Reading’s monks were drawn from the order of Cluny, linking the abbey into the wider Cluniac network, to which so many great churchmen belonged, among them several popes. Its most prized relic, given by the Empress Matilda, the daughter of the founder, was the hand of St James of Compostela, the Apostle to Spain, so that Reading joined an elite group of medieval religious institutions possessing remains of the Apostles of Christ.
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