MEDIEVAL ABBOTS LECTURE

28 Feb 2020

The latest event in our ongoing project with Dr Ben Pohl of the University of Bristol took place this week, a public lecture on Medieval Monastic Leadership and the writing of history. 

A large crowd turned out for the event, and enjoyed a great lecture from Dr Pohl, who explored how medieval abbots wrote history and also looked at the existing documents today which chart this. Many of these documents are housed at Fulda, a monastery in Germany, and these formed a large part of the talk, after Dr Pohl was on a placement there last year. 

The lecture forms part of an ongoing project of Dr Pohl’s which capitalises on a renewed interest, both public and scholarly, in the history and communal heritage of Benedictine monasticism from the Middle Ages to the present day through an innovative, engagement-led approach for studying the production and promotion of historical writing and thought in monastic communities. The project is showcasing Benedictine monasteries as key ‘centres of history’ within which historical knowledge has been collected, codified and communicated for generations.

To read more about Dr Pohl’s project on the Downside website click here, or visit his project site here.