The 4th Rye Medieval Academic Conference were held at Rye College on 13 October 2012. The theme was Religious Realities in Medieval England.
“The middle ages were the thousand years when England was Christianised and to be Christian became the only available choice. Christian beliefs and morals coloured most aspects of everyone’s lives. All around us there survive medieval cathedrals, churches, monasteries, hospitals and chantries. The Church hierarchy wrote the records that have transmitted their official views to us. But how far were these religious realities? Christianity and churches were above all about worship, about the endless cycle of services set to music that were open to those of whatever class or gender. If medieval cathedrals remain great monuments, their work was acutely scrutinised, and every generation preferred its newer modes of piety, from nunneries and hospitals to the chantries that adorned churches everywhere. If the medieval Catholic Church was run by male clerics for men, royal and saintly abbesses nevertheless ruled Anglo-Saxon convents and later on maidens, wives and widows managed to interpolate themselves into every type of religious record and experience.”
The speakers and their subjects were:
- Emerita Prof Barbara Yorke, Winchester University: Christianisation and Nunneries
- Philip Baxter, former Director of Music, Bolton Abbey: Liturgy and Church Music
- Dr David Lepine, Dartford Grammar School: The Late Medieval Cathedral
- Dr Cindy Wood, Associate Lecturer, Winchester University: Chantries and Cage Chantries
- Katie Clarke, Research Student, Winchester University: The Religion of Lay Women in the Later Middle Ages
- Dr Sheila Sweetinburgh, Kent University: Early founders and later inmates of medieval hospitals
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