Saints wearing make-up, Merlin’s prophecies and how we can end wars: Cambridge Festival 2024 showcases an array of leading experts exploring history, culture, and tradition

In "Can a Saint Wear Makeup? Cosmetics and Dress in the Middle Ages," (23 March), Alexandra Zhirnova asks ‘Do respectable women have to look a certain way?’ whilst exploring the medieval roots of stereotypes surrounding makeup and dress and their enduring impact on women's empowerment and societal perceptions today.

Zhirnova says: “We see through medieval stories of holy and ‘wicked’ women how the church’s ideas of modesty and appearance have become a lasting barrier for women’s access to power.”

The timely panel discussion "How do wars end?" (25 March) will cover the complexities of war and conflict. The panel includes Professor Sir Richard Evans, Professor Emeritus of History at Cambridge University and an historian of modern Germany and modern Europe. He joins the panel ahead of the release of his upcoming book ‘Hitler’s People’, due to be published by Penguin in August.

The event will provide a comprehensive exploration of the historical, political, and cultural aspects of conflict resolution. The panel also features Booker prize judge, author and translator Dr Uilleam Blacker, Professor Kristin Bakke (UCL), and Professor Ayse Zarakol, author of ‘Before the West: the rise and fall of Eastern world orders’. Award-winning BBC presenter Chris Mann, a former Moscow correspondent during the Cold War, will chair.

Anthropologist Sally Raudon leads the captivating exploration, "Last call: how different cultures deal with death" (28 March). Where is it normal to dig up and rebury a body? To keep the body at home for months, feeding and caring for it? Or even offer it to birds of prey? In this event, attendees will be taken on a global tour of funeral rituals offering insights into the incredible creativity and variety in what cultures do with their dead.

Raudon says: “In most cultures there are rules about how to care for the dead. And there's an understanding of the right thing to do to care for the dead to both help them into whatever comes next, whether that's an afterlife or reincarnation or a secure place in memory. To care for the dead is a profoundly human thing to do.”
 

In Why school history matters: Public discourses on the value of history for society, 1924–2024 (22 March) Dr. Tina Van der Vlies explores how history, compulsory on the national curriculum, is a highly contested school subject and a topic of polarised public debates. This was visible during the Black Lives Matter protests when campaigners publicly called on the Education Secretary to ‘decolonise’ the history curriculum. Public discourses are an important route to understanding the ways events and people, as well as cultural, economic and political developments have affected views on whether school history benefits society, and why this is such a contested issue.

"Medieval ‘nations’ and the prophecies of Merlin in Britain” (23 March) will transport attendees back to a time when prophecy writing was used as political propaganda by both revolt movements and monarchies in medieval Britain. This presentation will delve into the world of prophecy writing and its role as political propaganda, offering fresh insights into national sentiments in Britain.

Other events include:

• Dragons’ tails and Balor’s eye: Ireland’s history with the stars (23 March). Even before they had specialised terms for comets, meteors, galaxies and aurora, the people of Ireland were writing about the phenomena they observed in the night sky. Claiming to have seen hairy stars, showers of blood and dragons in the air, they inadvertently left us some of the earliest records of global astronomical events. This talk explores Ireland’s remarkable contribution to historical astronomy and astrology, and introduces some of the colourful names that were eventually assigned to constellations and spectacles like the Great Bear and the Milky Way.
   
• What’s Hecuba to us? Mythological revisionism through the ages (19 March)
  This talk centres on retellings of classical myth and epics from across the ages. Are you a fan of contemporary female-centric revisions, or do you stand by the Bard? Evgeniia Ganberg and Claudia Cornelissen discuss how authors have used, reworked and challenged classical texts in their rewritings, and what we can learn from our continual fascination with the classics.

• Mise-en-page: Designing musical manuscripts in pre-Conquest England (23 March). How was music written down in the early 11th century? Lottie Wells explores the layout of three pre-Conquest ‘tropers’, manuscripts of notated chant, to discuss how music was learned and performed in England before the Norman Conquest. The talk will analyse the construction and layout (or ‘mise-en-page’) of three manuscripts from the first half of the 11th century: Corpus 473 (the Winchester Troper), Bodley 775 and Cotton Caligula A. XIV (the Caligula Troper)
   

• 'Splendid in ashes, and pompous in the grave’: the usefulness of funerary monuments." (15 March). Dr. Jean Wilson (MBE) will shed light on the multidisciplinary nature of funerary monument studies and their profound significance in widening our understanding of the past. While some funerary monuments, such as the Pyramids, those of classical Greece and Rome, or, for instance, hogbacks in the north of Great Britain, are seen as proper foci for the archaeologist, later monuments are often overlooked, or treated as subsidiary architectural elements, rather than as discrete material remains.