As part of our MA in History, our postgraduate students work with the curators and collections of the Museum of English Rural Life to learn about the history of material culture, and the various ways in which historians can use objects and artefacts to understand the past.
The students then choose an object from the collection and produce a short blog, video, or podcast explaining what it can tell us about the period it was made. Here are three of those videos made by students on the 2018-19 MA course.
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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