Join us Friday 13th to Saturday 14th September 2019 for: Collecting, Curating, Assembling: New Approaches to the Archive in the Middle Ages

The School of Art History, SAIMS and the Special Collections Division at the University of St Andrews are pleased to announce an upcoming two-day conference on the archive in medieval art and thought. You can find a full programme of events on our website.

What can medieval collections, compilations and assemblages of material things tell us about the accumulation of knowledge and the preservation of memory? How is the archive manipulated to fit political or social agendas, and by whom? What are the limits of the medieval archive?

The conference begins at 2pm on Friday 13 September in St Martyrs Kirk with a lecture on collecting habits at medieval St Andrews by Senior Archivist Rachel Hart, followed by a handling session with materials from Special Collections.

The keynote lecture is scheduled for 5.15pm in School III. Our speaker is Dr Erik Inglis (Oberlin College, Ohio, USA), and his paper is titled ‘History in the Making: Categories, Techniques and Chronology in Church Collections, c800-1300’.

From 9am the following day in Parliament Hall, twelve further invited speakers will present new research on medieval collections of objects — such as books and manuscripts, relics and reliquaries, and precious textiles — as well as the motivations and methodologies of their collectors.

This conference is free and unticketed. However, if you are interested in attending the talk by Rachel Hart and subsequent handling session in Martyrs Kirk please email medievalarchive@st-andrews.ac.uk beforehand, since space is limited at this particular venue.

Collecting, Curating, Assembling schecule  Collecting, Curating, Assembling (PDF)