The Parish Church: History and Landscape.  A series of free public talks taking place in August and September in St Laurence’s church, St Benedict’s Street, Norwich.  All are welcome! 

Across Europe, the parish church has stood for centuries at the centre of the life local communities: the rituals performed there marked the stages of life from the cradle to the grave.  Nonetheless, artistically and architecturally, the church stood apart from the parish community.  It was often the largest and only stone-built building in a village; indeed, the towers and spires of parish churches are, to this day, the defining cultural feature of the European landscape.  As this series of talks will show, the accretions of the centuries make parish churches a fascinating record of continuing and changing attitudes towards religion and sacred space.

13th August at 6:00 pm: 'The Medieval Parish Church' (Mr Dominic Summers, University of East Anglia)
Parish churches were centres of local communities in the middle ages. They had an importance that we find difficult to imagine today, expressed in the great resources that were lavished on their buildings and decoration.  When a medieval person walked into a church they were not only entering an architectural space, they were crossing a threshold from earthly reality into another world, a recreation of a heavenly Jerusalem in which a calendar of dramatic rituals was played out, sacramental rites of passage were performed and where the living and the dead were brought together in commemoration. These themes will be explored in the magnificent setting of the church of St Laurence, one of Norwich's grandest late medieval buildings.

20th August at 6:00 pm: 'The Early Modern Parish Church' (Dr Margit Thøfner, University of East Anglia)
The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries saw very substantial changes to the usage and hence the fabric and furnishings of parish churches in England and across all of Europe.  Usually, these changes are explained by reference to the religious movements usually called ‘the Reformation’ and ‘the Counter-Reformation’.  Such explanations depend on drawing a strong contrast between ‘Catholic’ and ‘Protestant’ forms of worship, where it is assumed that one was based in a sumptuously staged ritual inherited from the middle ages whilst the other was iconoclastic and focused exclusively on preaching and the Bible.  However, as this talk will show, the historical reality was far more complex, both in England and elsewhere.  The Protestant Reformation actually sparked its own artistic tradition, most evident in the opulent churches of Lutheranism and Laudian Anglicanism but also eminently traceable in certain Calvinist buildings.

27th August at 6:00 pm: 'Looking After the Parish Church Today' (Ms Sara Croft, Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings)
When William Morris wrote his Manifesto for the newly formed Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings in 1887 he encouraged his readers to “stave off decay by daily care, to prop a perilous wall or mend a leaky roof”.  Although our parish churches are probably in better condition now than they were in Morris’ day they still require watchful attention and swift action to prevent leaky roofs and blocked gutters turning into serious and expensive repair projects. This talk will focus on the question of how we might look after our parish churches in the 21st century, covering everything from gargoyles to gulleys and parapets to plinths.

3rd September at 6:00 pm: 'The Parish Church and Immigrants' (Professor Andrew Spicer, Oxford Brookes University)
During the Elizabethan period, religious refugees from modern-day France, Belgium and the Netherlands established communities in London as well as towns in Kent and East Anglia, including Norwich. In many cases fleeing from religious persecution, these immigrants sought their own places of worship. In some communities they shared the parish church with the local people, elsewhere they were given redundant former religious buildings. This week we shall consider the relationship between these immigrant communities and the parish church in the early modern period.

10th September at 6:00 pm: 'The Parish Church and Pilgrims' (Dr Philippa Woodcock, Oxford Brookes University)
The Reformation disrupted ancient pilgrimage rituals across Europe; condemned by Protestants, Catholic authorities also sought to eradicate fraudulent shrines and regulate the behaviour of pious travellers. This week’s talk will show how rural parishes responded to pilgrims continuing to cross their land, sleeping in their homes and churches, and marking their landscape with crosses and chapels.  It will argue that the local response to pilgrimage remained enthusiastic, signalling a divide between popular beliefs and the official policy of the Church, the wider countryside and confined church boundaries.

13th September at 6:00 pm: 'The Parish Church and the Sea' (Dr Matthias Range, Oxford Brookes University)

This final talk in the series will examine how the landscape changes caused by the sea in the early modern period affected the parish organisation and the religious landscape of a diocese. The diocese taken as an example is that of Schleswig in Northern Germany; it lies between two seas: the North Sea and the Baltic Sea. Looking at several case studies and some hitherto unused original sources we shall explore how parish churches disappeared into the sea and how others were built in response to new conditions.  In effect, the diocese of Schleswig had to develop a number of coping strategies which most likely had parallels all the way along the treacherous North Sea coast, including that of Norfolk.

This series of talks is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council.  It forms part of a broader historical research project on the early modern parish church and the landscape, shared between academics at Oxford Brookes University and the University of East Anglia..