Kemerton Lectures started life after the war as adult education classes. These days we’re run independently (with no homework or marking!) and meet as a friendly group on Thursday evenings in the Village Hall in Autumn and Spring. The speaker for the term will give a series of illustrated talks on a theme, which may be as varied as local history, canals, art history (eg illuminated manuscripts; Tudor portraiture), poets inspired by the landscape, the development of surnames and placenames, or the Wars of the Roses.
We begin at 7.30 pm and charge £5 per evening. You are welcome to come for a whole course, or just drop in to individual talks. We find time for a coffee break, which offers the chance to put questions to the lecturer or chat to friends.
For further details please contact Sue Bennett (rpandsbennett@gmail.com; 01386 725 245).
Thursday evenings at 7.30 pm: 9,16,23,30 Jan; 6, 13, 20, 27 Feb; 6, 13 Mar 2025
Venue: Kemerton Village Hall
Admission: £5
We welcome the return of Dr Gillian White, historian and art historian, who is undertaking the challenge of covering 1000 years of the Holy Roman Empire – a title that is familiar, but about which we often know too little. We can, however, be sure that the upbeat presentation will be gripping.
Dr White writes:-
The Holy Roman Empire
... the Holy Roman Empire was in no way holy, nor Roman, nor an empire (Voltaire, 1773)
This term we shall be studying the Holy Roman Empire: a vast, amorphous, changeable and elusive power bloc that moved in and out of the pages of history for nearly a thousand years. Whilst we cannot follow every twist and turn, we will look at specific people and episodes in the empire’s story, including its origins in the collapse of the Western Roman Empire and the decline of the Eastern Empire based in Byzantium; the roles of Charlemagne and Otto in its foundation; the Investiture Controversy that saw generations of competition between emperors and popes; the reigns of medieval emperors from the Houses of Hohenstaufen, Luxembourg and Hapsburg; the growth of the empire under the extraordinary Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, becoming the original ‘empire upon which the sun never sets’; the Reformation, which found fertile ground in the scholarship and printing presses of the empire but nearly split that empire apart; the horrific bloodshed of the Thirty Years’ War; power tussles between Austria and Prussia in the eighteenth century; and then the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire following defeat by the new master of Europe, Napoleon Bonaparte.
One thousand years in ten weeks: the challenge is set!
Week 1 (9 Jan 2025) – Introduction
Week 2 (16 Jan 2025) – Charlemagne
Week 3 (23 Jan 2025) – From Charlemagne to Otto
Week 4 (30 Jan 2025) – The Empire and the Papacy I: The Investiture Controversy, 1076-1122
Week 5 (6 Feb 2025) – The Empire and the Papacy II: The Hohenstaufen Dynasty
Week 6 (13 Feb 2025) – The House of Luxembourg
Week 7 (20 Feb 2025) – Expansion, Consolidation and Reform: The First Habsburg Emperors
Week 8 (27 Feb 2025) – The Reformation
Week 9 (6 Mar 2025) – The Thirty Years’ War, 1618-1648
Week 10 (13 Mar 2025) – The End of the Empire