On Wednesday, 20th March 2024, Dr Lucinda Matthews-Jones joined us to discuss her current research project: the talk was titled ‘Walls, Doors and Windows: Urban Homemaking Through Settlement Houses, 1884-1920′. The seminar took place in MB0312, beginning at 4.30pm. 

Lucie is a Reader in Victorian History at Liverpool John Moores University. Her research explores the role of home, gender and class in the British university and social settlement movement. She is currently working on a monograph provisionally entitled ‘Settling at Home: The Making of the British Settlement Movement, 1883-1920’. Her research has been published in leading journals including ‘Victorian Studies’, ‘Journal of Victorian Culture’, ‘Women’s History’, ‘Cultural and Social History’, and in the edited collection ‘What is Masculinity? and A Cultural History of Home’. She also has a secondary interest in lived religion. She edited, with Timothy Jones (University of Melbourne), ‘Material Religion in Modern Britain: The Spirit of Things’ and has recently had a book chapter published on working-class religious practices in Jane Hamlett’s edited book ‘A Cultural History of Home’. 

This event was co-organised by The Nineteenth-Century Research Group and the Lincoln School of Humanities and Heritage Research Seminar. 

Time: 5pm-6:30pm

Location: Minerva Building MB0302 (Cargill Lecture Theatre)

Dr. Clare Broome Saunders (Blackfriars, St. Catherine’s College, Oxford) discusses ‘Visionary Medievalism in the Nineteenth Century: William Blake, Phoebe Anna Traquair, and EBB’s Sonnets from the Portuguese’.

Abstract: Both William Blake and Elizabeth Barrett Browning were skilful and politically driven medievalists: like Blake’s illustrations of Chaucer, EBB’s adaptations of medieval texts and forms offer rich social commentary, as demonstrated in the explosive, boundary-bursting Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850). When Phoebe Anna Traquair (1852-1936) embarked upon an ambitious and intricate project to illustrate EBB’s Sonnets, in 1892, she found her main inspiration for the project in Blake’s art. Traquair combined this with her love of medieval illuminated manuscripts, generated by childhood visits to see the Book of Kells at Trinity College, Dublin, and used her artistic medievalism to highlight the visionary poetic and socio-political medievalism that she found in Blake and EBB. Using Traquair’s illustrations for Sonnets from the Portuguese as a starting point, this talk will explore the ways in which EBB develops and refines Blake’s medievalist imagination.

Bio: Dr Clare Broome Saunders is The Senior Tutor and Fellow of Blackfriars Hall, and a member of the Faculty of English at the University of Oxford. Her research interests include nineteenth-century women’s poetry and nineteenth-century uses of history, as reflected in her books Louisa Stuart Costello: A 19th Century Writing Life (2015) and Women Writers and Nineteenth-Century Medievalism (2009), and in her recent publications on medievalism and politics, and the medievalism of Charlotte Brontë and Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

Organised by Renée Ward on behalf of the Medieval Studies Research Group and the Nineteenth-Century Research Group.