Paul Mellon Centre | Museums: Britain & the World in the Middle Ages

This lecture will examine the role of display in shaping our ideas about the medieval period. By looking at permanent collections alongside important recent exhibitions, we address the following questions: How do we communicate a shared Roman heritage for Islam, Judaism and Christianity? What can ancient trade routes tell us about the interaction of different ethnic groups? Can we reveal a plurality of audiences for a single object through display? What is the role of political agendas foreign to the medieval period in portraying a deceptive sense of uniformity for the time? It ends with new directions in curating the art of the Middle Ages, to show an audience that this distant time was always dynamically and deliberately inter-reliant with the known world.

No prior art historical knowledge is necessary.