Event Archive
This is an archive of past events within the Department of English Studies. Please see our current events for forthcoming activities.
Some of our public events are recorded and are available as podcasts via our Research English At Durham blog.
Walpole, Catholicism, and the Visual Arts
Discover how Horace Walpole brought Catholic culture back into fashion in Britain, at this lecture in our series Horace Walpole and his Legacies. Join the conversation via #WalpoleLegacies.
Walpole spent a great deal of his life engaging with Catholic culture in one way or another: collecting, and writing admiringly about, Catholic art; using Gothic ornament so extensively at Strawberry Hill and in his friendship with Roman Catholics, such as the Duchess of Norfolk. And yet, Walpole was very clearly not a crypto-Catholic. He sounded his antipathy to the church and its teachings frequently, and often stridently.
His position may therefore seem paradoxical, perhaps even perverse, but it was not. Focusing on his writings about art, this paper explores Walpole’s attitudes towards the past, and particularly the Reformation. It proposes that one of the central concerns of Walpole’s scholarship was to encourage the re-naturalization of art in post-Reformation Britain.
Image credit: Sassoferrato (1609-1689), Madonna & Child, Hermitage.
Contact fiona.robertson@durham.ac.uk for more information about this event.
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Events
We host a large number of conferences, lectures and seminars each year, many of them open to the public. Find out more on our Events page.
Podcasts
Many of our public lectures, seminars and conferences are recorded, and can be listened to as podcasts.
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Next Event
- 20th January 2021
- Sensory Experiments in Nineteenth-Century Literature
- Online (Zoom)
- Dr Erica Fretwell (University of Albany) and Dr Shannon Draucker (Siena College)