The Courtauld Medieval Work-in-Progress Seminars

Autumn Semester 2024

Christianity Before Conversion

Helen Gittos

Courtauld’s Vernon Square Campus, London

9 October 2024, 5:30-7:00 PM

Disk Brooch, early 600s, from Faversham, England. Met Museum, New York, OA. From https://courtauld.ac.uk/whats-on/christianity-before-conversion/

How did people convert to Christianity in early medieval England? What happens if we prioritise archaeological and art historical sources? In this seminar paper, Helen Gittos will propose a new framework for thinking about how such radical change happened.

Helen Gittos is particularly interested in the history of the church and its rituals in the Middle Ages, and is as keen on buildings, objects and archaeological evidence as on written texts. Her first book was Liturgy, Architecture and Sacred Places in Anglo-Saxon England (2013); she also co-edited two collections of essays on the topic: The Liturgy of the Late Anglo-Saxon Church (2005) and Understanding Medieval Liturgy (2015). A second strand of her research is about language, and in particular the role and status of English in relation to Latin; with Alban Gautier she co-edited Vernacular Languages in the Long Ninth Century (2021) and is currently writing a book, English in the Liturgy before the Reformation. She also been working on aspects of the conversion of the Anglo-Saxons to Christianity and the history of the sixth and seventh centuries in Britain.

Organised by Dr Tom Nickson (The Courtauld) as part of the Medieval Work-in-Progress Series.

Seminars are free and open to all. They are held in the Research Forum of The Courtauld Institute of Art’s Vernon Square campus,  starting at 5.30pm on Wednesdays.

Booking Opens at the end of September.

For more information, visit here.