The BSR Podcast

A lecture by Lara Pucci (BSR; Nottingham).

G.E. Rickman Lecture by Christer Bruun (Toronto).

An Ostian inscription from the reign of the emperor Hadrian honors the emperor because the colonia had been conservata et aucta. This lecture explores ways in which the emperors’ concern with the economy of the empire and the provisioning of Rome impacted on the town of Ostia and its inhabitants. It is normally taken for granted that the expansion of the harbour zone took place in general harmony: imperial investments flowed to Ostia-Portus, the town and its population grew steadily, and its business and trading community flourished. But were there no conflicts, no diverging voices and views on what kind of development was needed? It seems implausible that there were no worries in Ostia, and this lecture looks at neglected signs of local opinions and how the interaction between the imperial centre and Ostia may have played out.

A lecture by Peter Burke (Cambridge).

A cultural history of polymaths from the Renaissance to the present (from Leonardo to Umberto Eco), investigating how the species has managed to survive despite increasing specialization

BSR-Corning Museum of Glass David Whitehouse Memorial Lecture by Susan Walker (Oxford).

Archival research in Rome and Naples has shed light upon the formation of the third largest surviving collection of late Roman gold-glass. Charles Wilshere (1814-1906), a landowner with a passion for early Christianity, built his remarkable collection through a network of Italian scholars and dealers, notably the great Vatican archaeologist Giovanni Battista de Rossi, the Jesuit scholar Raffaele Garrucci, and the painter and dealer Vincenzo Capobianchi. In Italy, Wilshere took advantage of the political and social instability of the risorgimento years, and his collecting activities proved controversial. Nonetheless his motive was entirely didactic; within the UK, the collection has nearly always remained accessible to scholars and the public.
Recent research on the chemistry of the Wilshere gold-glass has built a chronological sequence offering insights into the social history of gold-glass in late antiquity.

Susan Walker is the principal author of Saints and Salvation: the Wilshere Collection of gold-glass, sarcophagi and inscriptions from Rome and Southern Italy, recently published by the Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford, where the Wilshere Collection is now displayed. From 2004-2014 she was Keeper of Antiquities at the Ashmolean, where she is now Honorary Curator; she is also an Emerita Fellow of Wolfson College, University of Oxford, and Chair of Publications for the British School at Rome. She undertook much of the research forming the core of the Whitehouse Lecture as Hugh Last Fellow at the British School at Rome in 2013.

A lecture by Simon Ditchfield (York)

A lecture by Ronald Ridley (Melbourne)

A lecture by Emily Michelson (St Andrews).
The 16th-century conversionary campaign against Jews took place largely in public, in the presence of many kinds of onlookers. Nowhere was conversion a greater spectacle than at forced sermons. This talk traces the journeys of the three main populations who converged at conversionary sermons in the early 1580s: Jews, Neophytes, and Christians. It blends an examination of urban renewal with religious questions to recreate the moment when public interest fixed on this new spectacle.

Molly Cotton Lecture by Vincenzo Fiocchi Nicolai (Tor Vergata).

Ricerche di archeologia cristiana in Sabina ed Etruria Meridionale: le chiese di S. Giacinto (Cures Sabini) e dei SS. Gratiliano e Felicissima (Falerii Novi)

A lecture by Derek Duncan (St Andrews)

W.T.C. Walker Lecture in Architectural History by Helen Hills (York).
Baroque Naples was tarnished in Protestant Europe with a reputation for excess — most especially an excess of silver in its churches and chapels, part of the mort main of the Spanish church, a prodigious resource that was gathering dust rather than fighting wars or generating interest. Silver was the material par excellence for chalices, pyx and plate, for carte di gloria and sacred and liturgical objects of many kinds, including the spectacular solid silver reliquaries in the Treasury Chapel of San Gennaro in Naples, unsurpassed amongst European treasuries. Silver was intimately implicated in discourses of the sacred, of assaying, of testing, of purity, purification and authenticity and sanctity through the discourse of light, lux and lumen, shine and the capacity to reflect light. And its threads were entangled in noble dress, furniture and accoutrements of aristocratic fashion. Yet silver was particularly implicated, too, in the violence of Spanish colonialism. This paper examines these apparently divergent qualities of silver to investigate relationships between matter and affect, colonialism and culture in baroque Italy.