God Save The King! Celebrating Coronations in the Middle Ages

This study day is available as both an in person and a recording only event. The recording will be made available to ALL attendees on the Monday following the event and will be available for 3 weeks.

With King Charles III’s May 2023 coronation relatively fresh in our minds, it is worth reflecting that many aspects of his coronation ceremony were rooted in traditions that extend back to the fourteenth century and earlier. This study day will explore the rich surviving material culture that furnished the coronations of Western and Byzantine emperors and European kings, and their queens, in the Middle Ages. We will consider the prestigious buildings, furnished with pavements, thrones, galleries and sculptural programmes designed to provide a fitting stage for elaborate coronation rituals: Old St Peter’s, Rome; the Palatine Chapel, Aachen; Reims Cathedral; and Westminster Abbey, London. We will look at glorious coronation regalia including ceremonial ivory combs, goldsmithswork orbs, swords, sceptres, spoons, and lavishly embroidered vestments. Bejewelled and enamelled medieval crowns deserve their own session, as do the detailed coronation manuals compiled in late-fourteenth-century Paris and London which illustrate, step by step, the sacred coronation rites of the French and English kings and their queens, as well as the subsequent feasts enjoyed by newly crowned monarchs. These superb buildings, books and other artefacts shine a light on the theories of, and reverence for, kingship in the Middle Ages.

Lectures

1        The architectural setting
2        Coronation regalia
3        Medieval crowns
4        Coronation manuals