Sanctuary Seminar Series: Losing Walsingham: Mary
When:
—
Venue:
Birkbeck 43 Gordon Square
No booking required
The Sanctuary Seminar Series, given by Professor Marina Warner, explores the meaning of sanctuary. The seminars are open to students on the following postgraduate courses: MA Renaissance Studies, MA Medieval Literature and Culture and MPhil/PhD students researching the period 1500-1680.
The concept of sanctuary ranges from a specific holy space, such as a temple or shrine, to a place of safety or refuge, both physical and metaphorical; it is set apart by certain processes from ordinary locales and sites of activity and its special 'sacrosanct' status depends on consensus to continue. It includes ideas of asylum, stronghold, home and inner sanctum or private territory. The medieval law of sanctuary offered a refuge to fugitives in certain churches, whatever the reason for their flight, and a popular sign still says, 'To you this may be a shed. But to me it's a sanctuary.' Sanctuary develops through shared notions about the rights of others and the obligations of hospitality, and therefore contributes to defining the claims of nation and home; these contradictory elements have been formed historically by a complex mesh of taboos, laws, customs and values that still reverberate today, in times when the numbers of refugees, from war, famine, and other dangers are perceived with growing hostility.
The seminars look at how different forms of sanctuary are established:
- How do places become holy, beyond consecrated sites of religious worship?
- What are the laws of hospitality and shelter and how have they changed?
This third seminar looks at the destruction of the most popular shrine in England, Walsingham, and at the reverberations of iconoclasm in Shakespeare, especially in the long poems, Venus & Adonis, and The Rape of Lucrece and in the play, The Winter's Tale. Holy sites and their histories reveal the decisive interplay between ideas about self and world, purity and impurity; works of literature and art are vitally involved in these processes of consecration and desecration and, through the vicissitudes in the lives of mythic and dramatic protagonists, the reader/audience can trace the contours of a larger picture about changing common values and the bonds between individuals and society.
Seminar 3 reading:
- William Shakespeare, Venus & Adonis; The Rape of Lucrece: The Winter's Tale.
- Ted Hughes, The Goddess of Complete Being, 1993.
- Dominic Janes and Gary Waller, eds.Walsingham in literature and culture from the Middle Ages to modernity, Ashgate. 2010. Introduction: ‘Walsingham, landscape, sexuality, and cultural memory’, by Dominic Janes and Gary Waller.
- Part I Landscape and the Sacred: 'Walsingham's local genius: Norfolk's 'newe Nazareth', by Stella A. Singer and ‘The Return of the Sacred Virgin: memory, loss, and restoration in Shakespeare's later plays’, by Susan Dunn-Hensley.
- Walsingham Richeldis 950:Pilgrimage and History Proceedings of the Richeldis 950 Historical Conference (Walsingham, 2011).
- Edmund Matyjaszek, ‘Walsingham in Ballad, Poetry, and Prose’. pp. 47-80.
- John Morrill, ‘In the Wracks of Walsingham: Dissolution and its Consequences’, pp. 97-112.
- Eamon Duffy,The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400-1580. Yale University Press, l992: ‘On 'sacred' and 'secular' time?’ pp. 46-52.
Secondary background reading:
- Mourid Bharghouti, I Was Born There: I Was Born Here, trans. Humphry Davies, Bloomsbury, 2012.
- Tacita Dean and Jeremy Millar, Place (Art Works), Thames and Hudson, 2005.
- Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection Durham North Carolina: Duke UP, l993.
- Marina Warner, Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary, rev ed. Oxford UP, 2013.
Contact name:
Euan Griffith