“These Conferences were begun eight years ago as part of a joint bid by Rye Castle Museum and the Rye Partnership to get a grant to stop the main Rye Castle – Ypres Tower leaking. One condition was to get Rye acknowledged by the academic world as a centre where the latest research in Medieval topics could be presented.
This has now become a biennial event bringing to Rye world class historians who present papers on their latest research before it is published. It also brings delegates from many parts of the the country and abroad who come to Rye to stay in our hotels and B & B’s and use our restaurants and shops.
This years Conference speakers have been organised by Professor Michael Hicks.
He writes of the Conference theme:
“RELIGIOUS REALITIES IN THE MEDIEVAL ENGLAND”
The middle ages were the thousand years when England was Christianised and to be Christian became the only available choice. Christian beliefs and morals coloured most aspects of everyone’s lives. All around us there survive medieval cathedrals, churches, monasteries, hospitals and chantries. The Church hierarchy wrote the records that have transmitted their official views to us. But how far were these religious realities?
Christianity and churches were above all about worship, about the endless cycle of services set to music that were open to those of whatever class or gender. If medieval cathedrals remain great monuments, their work was acutely scrutinised, and every generation preferred its newer modes of piety, from nunneries and hospitals to the chantries that adorned churches everywhere. If the medieval Catholic Church was run by male clerics for men, royal and saintly abbesses nevertheless ruled Anglo-Saxon convents and later on maidens, wives and widows managed to interpolate themselves into every type of religious record and experience.
The programme is on the poster and more details an be obtained from the Rye Partnership at tilling Green Community Centre. Phone 01797229600 or e mail [email protected]
From the October 2012
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