Unfortunately, I’m going to have to miss tomorrow (Friday) and Saturday, including the Canterbury Medieval Pageant, and today I was partly at the Faculty conference giving a presentation on migration in 15th-century Kent and therefore missed quite a few of the papers at Dr Diane Heath’s NHLF-funded Medieval Animals Heritage ‘Skin and Bone, Wood and Stone’ conference.

However, the papers I did manage to get to were excellent and I heard great reports about the others. Nevertheless, rather than report on just a few, I thought what I would do as a way of getting something out would be to post a series of photos to take you through Wednesday evening and at least to provide a flavour of Thursday. Then once I’m back and I have a report in on the conference, Diane is organising that, I’ll add it so that we have a record that reflects this splendid conference in its richness, as well as the collegiate spirit shown by all concerned – final years undergraduates, postgraduates, staff, speakers from across the world, Diane’s project volunteers from outside the university and people from Kent who came to find out more about medieval animals.

We then moved into the foyer for Dr Sonia Overall’s fabulous animal poetry readings.

Then it was time for ‘Rethinking the Medieval Pig’

Thursday brought more delights.

Moving to the afternoon:

This reminded me of the story of the ‘unjust judge’ and its use in a sermon given in Elizabethan Canterbury. Then we were onto the last session of the day entitled ‘Howl!’

For the final event, we went up to the Beaney to see the ‘Medieval Animals’ pop-up exhibition curated by the SEND children.

With more to come soon …