A COLLABORATIVE £1 million project between the University of Reading and the British Museum is set to transform understanding of religion in the English Middle Ages, which has largely been unrecorded by written sources.
Funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the Medieval Ritual Landscape Project (MeRit) will bring together archaeologists and historians to analyse artefacts from regional, national and international perspectives.
The project will uncover the everyday religious practices of people of that time, particularly in response to major social upheavals, such as the Black Death and the Reformation.
Pooling together a range of disciplines and approaches, researchers will explore how rituals affected medieval people’s experiences of gender, family and community.
By using items recorded in the Portable Antiquities Scheme (PAS), the project will unlock the potential of public finds data, comparing religious objects, such as pilgrim badges, papal bullae, book fittings and objects with sacred inscriptions, recovered as public finds with those excavated from archaeological contexts in three case study regions: Kent, Norfolk and North Yorkshire.
Roberta Gilchrist, professor of archaeology at the University of Reading, said: “It is fantastic to be working with the British Museum and PAS on this project; by utilising a wealth of untapped public finds data, we will be able to highlight the beliefs and religious agency of ordinary people at regional, national and international scales.”
The PAS database holds information on more than 1,670,000 artefacts, all freely accessible to the public, most of which have been discovered by metal-detectorists. The items help advance knowledge and further public interest in the past.
The project is managed by the British Museum in England and through Museum Wales in Wales, working with almost 100 national and local organisations.
Michael Lewis, co-investigator and dead of the PAS, said: “Reporting medieval finds is incredibly important for improving our understanding of medieval religion and how it operated outside the church. Through the MeRit project, we hope to improve how medieval religious finds are recorded and understood.”
Working alongside similar portable antiquities schemes in Denmark and Netherlands, the project will look to make comparisons between religious finds in north-west Europe. It will also work with citizen scientists and local museums to produce finds recording guides and creative approaches to object biographies for use by the public, the heritage industry and museums.
Research outputs will be shared through conference sessions at the European Archaeological Association Conference and Leeds International Medieval Congress, Open Access publications and a publicly accessible database.
There will also be public lectures, local talks, blogs, podcasts and magazine articles to share new insights into everyday religion in the Middle Ages and the importance of reporting medieval finds.
