Month: June 2022

This evening I attended the premiere of Christian Horsnell’s documentary film ‘St Edmund: From King to Legend’ at Abbeygate Cinema in Bury St Edmunds. The film tells the story of the development and significance of St Edmund’s cult between 869 and 1020, when a Benedictine abbey was founded at Bury St Edmunds. Christian Horsnell interviewed me for the film early in 2020, and after this evening’s screening Christian and I both answered questions from the audience about the film and about St Edmund.

There will be further screenings of the film at Abbeygate Cinema in the coming week and you can book tickets here.

This afternoon BBC Radio 4’s PM Programme featured an interview in which Evan Davis spoke to me about the history and folklore of beacons. The segment was recorded on 1 June at Castor in Cambridgeshire, where we witnessed the lighting of the village’s new gas-fed beacon for the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee.

Although the tradition of lighting beacons for royal jubilees dates back only to Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897, the lighting of fires has long been a symbol of great national events. Beacons that served as warnings, and as a primitive system of telegraphy, are now a symbol of national unity as well as a powerful emblem of continuity with the ancient past; the high places in the landscape where beacons are lit today may well be the same places where beacons have been lit for as long as humans have sought to communicate over long distances.

You can listen to the interview here from time signature 31:00.

My review of Ronald Hutton’s new book Queens of the Wild: Pagan Goddesses in Christian Europe: An Investigation has just been published by First Things magazine, and explores the light this book sheds on the real history of paganism in the medieval period.

Yesterday (31 May) the Lithuanian Embassy in London hosted an online launch for my recently published book Pagans in the Early Modern Baltic. The Lithuanian Ambassador to the United Kingdom, HE Renatas Norkus, recorded a message welcoming participants before Dr Pavel Horák hosted the event. I gave an introduction to the book, exploring some of its main themes, before Prof. Vytautas Ališauskas of Vilnius University responded with his reflections on the book, followed by Dr Toms Ķencis of the University of Latvia. There was then an opportunity for me to respond to questions sent in by listeners. The launch produced an interesting discussion, and it is my hope that it marks a new development in the study of Baltic religion beyond the Baltic states.

I am very grateful to the Lithuanian Embassy for hosting this event, to the academic participants and to all who attended online.

Arc Humanities Press is currently offering a 40% discount on the book (until 24 June) if the book is purchased via the websites of Arc Humanities Press or Amsterdam University Press. Enter the code PEMA40 when prompted.