On 27^th February the Society hosted a workshop on the Winton Domesday, which is one of the most important manuscripts in the Society’s library. The workshop which was organised by the Hampshire Cultural Trust was attended by academics and scholars to think about and discuss the potential for a new study of the Anglo-Saxon and Norman city of Winchester.


Delegates had the opportunity to study both the Winton Domesday (SAL/MS/154)  and the fragments of a 10^th century sacramentary (SAL/MS/154*) that were once part of the original binding, used as packing for the boards.  


The manuscript and the fragments will be the star exhibits in an exhibition at the Winchester Discovery Centre in autumn 2020.

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 Satire of eighteenth-century Antiquaries, Rijksmuseum, RP-P-2015-26-305.

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Peter Kidson FSA, historian of medieval architecture, died in February. An appreciation appears in Fellows Remembered below. The section also contains a further notice on the late Pamela Willetts FSA, with details of the funeral and a memorial event.
 
John Bedford FSA, London dealer in antique furniture, died on 12 February aged 77. He was elected a Fellow of the Society in March 2017.

Sebastiano Tusa, 66, an Italian archaeologist who had been appointed Councillor for Cultural Heritage for the Sicilian Region in April 2018, was among those who died when an Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 737 passenger jet crashed near Addis Ababa on 10 March. He was en route to Kenya for a Unesco project. The son of archaeologist Vincenzo Tusa, Sebastiano had been a lecturer at the University of Bologna, Professor of Prehistoric Archaeology at the University of Naples, and Professor of Marine Archaeology at the University of Palermo. He was a visiting professor at the Philipps University of Marburg, Germany, in 2015. The photo shows Tusa (centre) in February, at the opening of a new laboratory at the Civic Museum of Natural History, Comiso.
 
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Ten new Fellows were elected on 7 March:
 
John Adamson (publishing, history of material culture).
 
George Carter (garden history and design).
 
Oliver Harris (archaeology).
 
Judith Hawley (18th-century English Literature and culture).
 
Sophie Jackson (development archaeology).
 
Susan Moore (archive research, Chancery Proceedings).
 
Daniel Slatcher (development archaeology).
 
Spencer Smith (building and landscape archaeology).
 
Jane Stevenson (Post-Classical and Renaissance studies, 20th-century art).
 
Thomas Williams (archaeology and history of Vikings in Britain).
 
For details see Ballot Results. Further details can be seen in the Ballot Archive (Fellows only).
 
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Fellows are among seven curators named as the first beneficiaries of the Headley Fellowships with Art Fund (7 March) Dan Hicks FSA (on left), Curator of Archaeology, Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, will research colonial histories in the Pitt Rivers collection (April 2019–March 2020). Bryan Sitch FSA (right), Deputy Head of Collections, Manchester Museum, will create a new gallery of Chinese culture (February–November 2019). Launched in July 2018, the programme will provide £600,000 over the next three years to UK curators ‘to realise ideas for engaging audiences as well as to broker new relationships and share knowledge with museums and peers across the country’. It is intended to give experienced curators time and resources to pursue in-depth research, and encourage ambitious and high-quality museum projects which have collections at their core.
 
Richard Osgood FSA was awarded Archaeologist of the Year at the annual Current Archaeology Live! event on 8 March. In an interview for Andante Travels, Osgood talks about deciding to become an archaeologist when he was 11 after finding a Roman villa while avoiding school cross country runs, his excavations at Barrow Clump on Salisbury Plain (‘fundamental to the success of the Operation Nightingale programme’, which works with service personnel injured in recent conflict – ‘many of the participants seem to regard it as something of an archaeological “battle honour”') and advising Philip Pullman on archaeology for his Northern Lights, the first of the His Dark Materials trilogy.
 
Rachel Moss FSA and Fainche Ryan have created a free online course from Trinity College Dublin, called The Book of Kells: Exploring an Irish Medieval Masterpiece. It is returning after a successful first run, and is aimed at everyone from academics to the general public who are interested in the history, crafting, and enduring legacy of one of the world’s most famous medieval manuscripts. The four-week course, which starts on 18 March, covers Where and how the manuscript was made; Its social context; Its artistic context; The theology and interpretations of the text; How and why the manuscript survived; and The Book of Kells and contemporary culture. Details online.
 
‘Analysing the value of degrees according to their impact on the taxpayer provides only part of the picture and overlooks the wider value of degrees,’ wrote Sir David Cannadine FSA, President of the British Academy, to the Times (7 March). ‘Arts and humanities graduates make invaluable contributions to culture and society. Eighty per cent of the UK economy derives from the services sector, which is underpinned by graduates in these disciplines.’ He was responding to a report from the Institute for Fiscal Studies that claimed that ‘creative arts degrees cost the taxpayer more than others [such as Science and engineering] because graduates are less likely to pay off their loans.’ Speaking on 31 January, Chris Skidmore FSA MP said, ‘the last thing I want to see is value judgements emerging which falsely divide the Sciences and Engineering from the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences. To do so would be a travesty. Our future success depends on all these disciplines being completely intertwined.’

Paul Bidwell FSA, President of The Arbeia Society and former Head of Archaeology at Tyne & Wear Archives & Museums, has written Hadrian’s Wall at Wallsend, a full account of one of the most comprehensively excavated sections of Hadrian's Wall. The book reports on intermittent excavations around Segedunum Roman Fort, Wallsend in North Tyneside, between 1988 and 2015, culminating in a Treasury-funded project that saw the rediscovery of the fort’s baths as well as the public display of a stretch of Wall remains. ‘The results,’ said Bidwell in a press release, ‘are a great advance in our understanding of how Hadrian’s Wall was built and of its later history. They also show that the remains of the Wall in urban Tyneside are just as important as the better-preserved lengths in rural Northumberland.’

‘Recently,’ writes James Stephen Curl FSA in New English Review (March), ‘the British magazine, Prospect (275, March 2019), published a “duel” between Barnabas Calder, an enthusiastic supporter of “Brutalism”, and myself: the proposition was “Has modern architecture ruined Britain?” I did not like the question, as any work of architecture, realised today, is obviously “modern”, and that does not necessarily mean it is rotten architecture, although more often than not, unfortunately, new buildings are truly dreadful, ignoring their contexts, and could never be described as “architecture” at all by any thinking person.’ Curl didn't like the answer either – even though he won, with 638 votes cast for YES (65%) and 341 for NO (35%). As he writes in an email: ‘YES represents my viewpoint, that architectural Modernism has wrecked a great many towns and cities in these islands… the YES votes have won the duel, and all my supporters deserve my thanks. However, it is profoundly depressing that so many people are now so visually desensitised … that they cannot see, will not admit (for ideological reasons), or are really incapable of understanding, the damage that has been done and continues, almost everywhere, and this is borne out by the fact that 341 people voted NO.’

His primary research concerns ancient Egypt, says Aidan Dodson FSA, but he also has a wider interest in funerary customs. A second edition of his British Royal Tombs was published last autumn. Reviewing the book in the Art Newspaper (28 February) under the headline ‘Dead kings and queen and where to find them,’ Aldo Scardinelli writes that ‘For the many people, like myself, who love to visit cemeteries and mausoleums, this book is a sine qua non. Not only does it list in chronological order all the British rulers and their burial places from the sixth-century English and the ninth-century Scottish kingdoms to George VI, the late Queen Mother and Princess Margaret, it also includes biographical notes, and images of their burial places… Wales has no royal burials.’

The Last Tsar: Blood and Revolution, an exhibition at the Science Museum which investigates the lives and deaths of Tsar Nicholas II and his family, closes on 24 March. In the context of social upheaval and war between 1900 and 1918, the exhibition shows the significant influence of medicine on the imperial family’s private lives, and the modern advances in medicine and forensic science which transformed the investigation into their sudden disappearance. ‘This exhibition marks 100 years since the end of the Romanov dynasty,’ said Ian Blatchford, Director of the Science Museum, in a press statement, ‘and explores one of the most dramatic periods in Russian history, all through the unique lens of science. Our curatorial team have brought together an exceptional, rare and poignant collection to tell this remarkable story.’
 

Peter Kidson FSA died on 10 February aged 93. He was a Lifetime Fellow of the Society, having been elected in January 1961.

A Festschrift, Medieval Architecture and its Intellectual Context, was published in Peter Kidson’s honour on the eve of his retirement from the Courtauld Institute in 1990, edited by Eric Fernie FSA and Paul Crossley FSA. In their introduction, the editors wrote that Kidson ‘was arguably the most influential historian of medieval architecture of his generation in the English-speaking world. Few scholars in his field remained untouched by his special, and very personal, power to illuminate the broadest areas of medieval architectural history. In his hands medieval buildings became much more intelligible as central achievements of the medieval mind.’
 
‘He eschewed the Pevsneresque focus on antiquarian detail,’ says an obituary in the Telegraph (28 February), ‘instead showing how the emergence of new styles was shaped by anonymous builders thinking imaginatively about architectural problems and working out effective solutions. He emphasised the importance of seeing medieval churches and cathedrals as conceived within the framework of theology and medieval understanding of history and mathematics – as reflected in techniques of planning, building, and associated iconography.’
 
Kidson published his first book in 1958, Sculpture at Chartres with photos by Ursula Parisier (‘still the most lucid presentation of that intricate iconography’, write Fernie and Crossley), followed in 1962 by ‘what may be his most influential contribution to the study of English medieval architecture in his chapter in the History of English Architecture. Here, for the first time, English Romanesque and Gothic were analysed not in terms of antiquarian detail of “interior space”, but as the history of a series of architectural problems the solutions to which precipitated the emergence of new styles.’
 
‘No one but Peter Kidson’, continue Fernie and Crossley, ‘could have completely rewritten the chapters on Gothic for the latest edition of Bannister Fletcher FSA’s A History of Architecture with such magisterial ease and clarity. His more specialised articles reveal the same breadth of vision: from 12th-century Tewkesbury to St George’s Chapel Windsor, from St High’s Choir at Lincoln to the Master of Naumberg, from William of Sens and the factions of Canterbury, to his three-pronged attack on the most cherished beliefs of Erwin Panofsky, Otto von Simson, and Sumner Crosby about Suger’s St-Denis.’
 
Peter Kidson was born near York Minster, which inspired an interest in Gothic architecture before his family moved to Kent when he was seven. In 1943 he won an exhibition to read Geography at Selwyn College, Cambridge, was conscripted in the Royal Navy, and returned in 1946 to switch to history and then moral sciences. He took a degree in art history at the Courtauld Institute (where, write Fernie and Crossley, his tutor Christopher Hohler FSA was an important influence), then a PhD (Systems of Measurement and Proportion in Early Medieval Architecture) supervised by Geoffrey Webb FSA. In 1955 he joined the Institute’s Conway Library (under George Zarnecki FSA), becoming Conway Librarian in 1959.
 
‘Through most of the 1960s,’ write Fernie and Crossley, ‘he dazzled a whole generation of students at the universities of Cambridge and East Anglia with the brilliance of his teaching.’ In 1967 he was appointed a Lecturer at the Courtauld, and Reader in 1971. He was Visiting Professor at the University of Victoria, BC in 1972, he gave the Mellon Lectures at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC in 1980, and in 1982 he was the Rhind Lecturer at the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland. He was awarded a Personal Chair in London University in 1988. He remained at the Courtauld until retirement in 1990 as Honorary Fellow and Emeritus Professor. He was appointed a Royal Commissioner in 1977 and Chairman of the Commission's Architectural Committee (1985–87), and he was President of the British Archaeological Association (1980–82).
 
‘Virtually single-handed,’ conclude Fernie and Crossley, ‘Peter Kidson took the study of medieval architecture in this country onto a new level of intellectual sophistication.’

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The Times (5 March) has published an obituary of the late Pamela Willetts FSA, who died in January.
 
She was, headlined the paper, ‘Deputy keeper of manuscripts at the British Museum who charmed composers’ families into parting with their papers.’ In this way she helped the BM acquire papers of Edward Elgar, Gustav Holst and Arnold Bax, among others. She deciphered the ‘Kafka sketchbook’ of Beethoven manuscripts and published Beethoven and England (1970).
 
Born in Kingston upon Thames, she studied history at Newnham College, Cambridge. She spent three years at the Air Ministry, helping to prepare the official history of the Second World War. She became Assistant Keeper of Manuscripts at the British Museum in 1953 (rising to Deputy Keeper in 1972 and Deputy Director in 1985, taking early retirement in 1987), ‘attracted to the position by the opportunity to further her musical interests. She was a highly competent pianist, violinist and viola player, although not quite at professional standard, and enjoyed playing with friends. It was through them that she met Edgar Gordon, known as Mick. They were married in July 1956 and moved to Barnes. A large room became the music room, being used for teaching, informal musical gatherings and rehearsals of the Sacred Music Drama Society, of which Gordon was the driving force and Willetts played the violin.’

• The funeral will be on Tuesday 19 February at 2.30pm at Great Glen Crematorium near Leicester (details online). ‘Additionally,’ writes Pamela Willetts’ son Andrew Gordon, ‘if anyone who remembers Pamela would be interested in attending a memorial event in London on 16 April (which would have been the month of her 90th birthday), please contact me on andy@oadbygrange.co.uk or mobile 07976 199553.’