In this interview, Jessica Knowles discusses her current research into the apocalyptic stained glass window in  St Martha’s pilgrim hospice church in Nuremburg, comparing it to the apocalyptic window in All Saints’ Church in York, northern England.

Jessica is considering St Martha’s window in its fullest context of the late 14th century.  Therefore this includes not only the images and surviving text surrounding the images, but also the story these images and texts told, and how these stories fitted with the stories told by adjacent windows, now lost, in St Martha’s.  In addition, she considers the people who saw the window and the ways in which they would have seen and experienced it, also the people who paid for the window and how they benefited from this donation and memorial.  Jessica concludes that, although today we see the apocalyptic images and windows as perhaps negative as the physical world burns and is destroyed, late medieval people would probably have seen them as positive, happy and an image of the salvation of their souls.

This podcast is part of a series of interviews covering central Europe in the medieval period for MECERN and CEU Medieval Studies.