Glastonbury Abbey – Influence and Legacy

A seminar at

Abbey House, Chilkwell Street, Glastonbury

Saturday 2 February 2013, 10 am – 4.30 pm.

 The last few years have been and exciting time for Glastonbury archaeology and history, with the rediscovery and reinterpretation of material from historic excavations, new surveys of the Abbey grounds and architectural remains, and the exploration of new directions in historical understanding. Here a group of distinguished scholars at the cutting edge of Glastonbury research present an overview of the Abbey’s role in national life from its shadowy beginnings to the dawn of the Romantic era.

Registration: £15, payable by cheque to ‘British Orthodox Church’

BOC Secretariat, 10 HeathwoodGardens, Charlton, London, SE7 8EP

Programme: 

Welcome and Introduction: H.E. Abba Seraphim, Metropolitan of Glastonbury. 

New archaeological perspectives from the Historic Excavations of Glastonbury Abbey

Dr. Cheryl Green

The Glastonbury Abbey Excavation Archive Project is analysing, reinterpreting and making available the entire unpublished archaeological archive from the excavations conducted between 1908 and 1979. The paper outlines the historic excavations and the scope of this project before introducing some of the new discoveries and re-evaluations in relation to the mid- to late Saxon period.

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Coffee

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Glastonbury‘s Role in Late Saxon England

Prof. Michelle Brown

Michelle P. Brown, Professor Emerita, University of London, and former Curator of Illuminated Manuscripts at the British Library will speak about Glastonbury Abbey in the Anglo-Saxon period and its contribution towards the material culture of the reform movement of the tenth century.

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Sandwich Lunch

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IESVS: MARIA: The Late Medieval Cultus of the Virgin at Glastonbury.                                                                           

Dr. Tim Hopkinson Ball

Through the story of its foundation, a church explained its existence and proclaimed its sanctity, both to itself and to the wider world. This paper explores the Virgin’s centrality to Glastonbury’s self identity in the high Middle Ages, especially in relation to lived spirituality at the abbey and the monastery’s putative founder, St Joseph of Arimathea.

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Afternoon Tea

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After Arimathea

Dr. Adam Stout

Joseph of Arimathea, lionised as a proto-Protestant in Elizabethan England, was consequently put firmly in his place by Catholics keen to assert the primacy of Rome. Adam Stout looks at how the political and religious changes of the next century or so saw this potent figure re-adopted by the Catholic cause amid Jacobite claims to speak for the whole nation

Summary: Paul Ashdown.