Evening Lectures
Turning the Page season 2024-25
Evening lecture information:
Drinks reception from 6pm
Lectures from 6.30-7.30pm
Tickets £10 / Booking essential via webcollect, by telephone or in person at the Institution.
21 November 2024
Viktor J. Speredelozzi
Necromancer Monks: The Cultural Context of Monks Summoning Demons and Using Ritual Magic
Medieval sources are filled with tales of monks and friars performing necromancy rituals and summoning demons, but how true is this really?While modern thought may want to dismiss the concept of magic, magic was very much part life in the Middle Ages. Magic was a way in which people interpreted the world around them. The clergy were not above performing magical rituals either. In fact, clergy such as monks and friars were more likely to perform forms of learned magic such as necromancy than their lay counterparts. This was due to their education in Latin and the holy materials the rituals required.
The medieval university environment was rife with opportunities for monastic scholars to experiment with magical rituals and necromancy. A combination of factors, such as newly found freedom, financial woes, difficulties in independent study, and competing for higher social standing all contributed to ritual magic’s appeal.
This talk will be divided into three sections. The first section will explain what ritual magic and necromancy is as well as provide cultural context for why monks and friars would use necromancy and demon summoning. The second section will discuss one of the few named necromancer monks in the historical record, French Benedictine monk John of Morigny, and the historical context surrounding his autobiography. Additionally, I will talk about Devon’s own monk, Richard Dove of Buckfast Abbey and his university notebook containing magical rituals. In the third half of the talk, I will tell stories about medieval necromancer monks, describe some real life medieval magical rituals and why their practitioners believed they worked.
Viktor J. Speredelozzi has his masters in Medieval Studies. He wrote his dissertation on monastic necromancers and works as an information assistant at a library. He has spoken previously at Powderham Castle, the Phoenix, and the University of Exeter.
30 January 2025
David Radstone
From gunpowder to gall stones – An illustrated history of the two medical Pages.
We follow the lives of the two medical Pages, Dr David and Dr George Page, father and son, accompanied by the medical artefacts they donated to the Devon & Exeter Medical Heritage Trust.
Prof. David Page, the elder, is Professor of Geology in Newcastle. In 1858, his son David attended the University of Edinburgh, his father’s alma mater, and earned a first-class degree in Chemistry.
David became Chief Chemist at the Low Wood Gunpowder Works in Furness. The factory’s safety record was poor, with frequent accidental explosions. This prompted David to change from chemistry to medicine. In 1869, he was the undergraduate President of the Edinburgh Royal Medical Society, and in 1870, he was awarded the Ettles Scholarship.
David qualified as an MD with a Gold Medal in 1873. David became one of the newly established Medical Officers of Health (MOH). They were part of the sanitary movement in 19th-century Britain, concerned with the health of towns and the need to control disease. David’s first job was MOH Westmoreland. By 1886, he was the Local Government Board inspector for Northumberland, Cumberland, Durham, Yorkshire, Lancashire, Cheshire, and, weirdly, Kent.
David travelled alone across Britain by horse, inspecting hospitals, water, drainage, and sewers, supervising food factories and dairies, and collecting data on infectious diseases, infant mortality, illegitimacy, homelessness, births and deaths. In lonely, inhospitable journeys, he frequently fell off his horse. While decorating the tree one Christmas, he fell off a ladder and was “never the same.” He consulted the leading neurologist, John Hughlings Jackson, at Barts, who told him he had a brain tumour and simply advised him to take an early holiday.
David and his wife went on a European tour in 1889. They had just reached Dublin, where he died of a fit. David’s son George followed his father to Edinburgh, qualifying MD with honours in 1912. George immediately joined the Royal Navy and was appointed Surgeon Lieutenant to HMS Teal in the China Station. George was seconded to an International Hospital in Shanghai run by Germany. He was working there in 1914 when he found himself amicably working in neutral territory with colleagues who had become his enemies. George was rapidly removed and promoted to Surgeon-Commander with the Royal Navy Air Service.
He left the Navy in 1922 and became MOH in Roxburghshire and Exeter from 1933 until retirement in 1950. He had an enormous range of responsibilities, even more than his father, but limited to Exeter. His duties are evident from his annual reports, which include most of what his father did but added vaccination and TB. His most significant impact on the structure of the City of Exeter was extensive slum clearance in the west and the lean-to hovels against the city walls. His assistant was Dr. Sydney Pereira-Gray, the father of Exeter’s first Professor of General Practice.
20 February 2025
Prof. Nicola Thomas and members from the Double Elephant Print Workshop Community Research Team
New histories of paper and print in Exeter: mapping materials, landscapes, people and connection.
This lecture explores what a new page in the paper history of Exeter and its region might include. We share the findings from the ‘Paper and Print’ research project that set out to surface diverse ‘shards’ of paper history linked to the Exeter city region. During 2024, 15 community researchers worked with the support of Double Elephant Print Workshop, Exeter University and Heritage Lottery Fund to explore how we might deepen our understanding of the history of paper in Exeter’s city region.
During our research we have walked Exeter’s paper landscape; talked to residents and built trust with who have a connect ion with the region’s paper industry. We have started to collect memories and oral histories and undertaken archive research. We have gained access to family papers and received papers given to us for safe keeping including recipes of the paper made in Head Wier. We have taken fieldtrips t mills and visited London archives to explore insurance papers. In Exeter we worked in the Devon Heritage Centre, Exeter Cathedral Archives, Devon and Exeter Institution. In our homes we have spent hours online looking at newspaper and census records and re-thinking existing traces of paper history with our new perspectives.
Over time we have pieced together what is less visible from many of Exeter’s paper histories is the evidence of those who worked in mills: the rag pickers living in the west quarter of Exeter; the child apprentices learning their trade; the specific journeying paper makers who travelled between mills; the workers who experienced industrial accidents, or lost their lives in mill fires. We have looked for the global trade in esparto grass as a source of pulp, and found it because of an accident linked to an esparto grass boiler in Silverton Mill. We have identified green energy sources and sources of industrial river pollution.
For many paper historians the history of paper stays close to the process of production of paper, mill company history, and industrial architecture. Our histories of paper making in Exeter have sought new directions in these established areas, tracing the quirky histories of mill owning families and their marriage alliance to build paper mill empires. We have sought global connections in the movement of people and materials. Notable paper makers from the Exeter region include Thomas Wilcox who took his skills to Pennsylvania, USA, and established Ivy Mills in the 1720s. We also find Mahesh Prased Bhayar, an Indian ‘technical scholar’ from the city of Gwalior (an important site of paper production in central India) who lived on St David’s Hill and worked at Silverton Mill.
Nicola Thomas is Professor of Historical and Cultural Geography and Head of Geography at the University of Exeter. She has developed a body of work around craft geographies, situating contemporary and 20th century craft practice within the broader creative economy. Her approach addresses the intersection of material, historical, cultural, social, political and economic contexts through an exploration of craft makers livelihoods and the spatial dimension of their labour. Her research always attends to the historicity of cultural production and consumption, bringing a historical sensitivity to critical understandings of the cultural and creative economy.
The Double Elephant Print Workshop Team of community researchers invite you to join this lecture and share our journey and shards from the past as we re-imagine Exeter’s paper and print histories.
20 March 2025
Ben Clapp
Miss Tothill: The Curator and the Curious
Miss Maud Tothill, a unique and wonderful woman was the first Curator of St Nicholas Priory, but lived an active and varied life for many years before that, notably working as a book seller and an art dealer and being trained as an Elocutionist. When she was appointed Curator of St Nicholas Priory in 1916 with a salary of £65 she was expected by many in the city to be little more than a custodian or caretaker, but very quickly she made the role her own, first giving tours, then lectures and finally raising donations to buy numerous objects for St Nicholas Priory.
Most fortunate for us was her keeping of a scrapbook of her 22 years as Curator of the Priory. This unique document, long known of but believed lost, has recently come to light once more and it reveals an immense amount of information on both Miss Tothill herself, St Nicholas Priory specifically, and life in Exeter from 1916 through to 1939 in general. Her foresight in creating this book allows us to see numerous otherwise unknown events, such as the visit of Thomas Hardy in 1918 to the Priory, through to that of Princess Katherine of Greece in the early 1930s in a morale boosting mission. It shows how highly the city council appreciated her services, with her being the official chosen to greet various foreign and local school groups for the city as a whole, as well as numerous invites to the mayor’s table. Finally it also reveals the remarkable story of her Ravens which she kept at the Priory, captivating visitors for many years and which has become the most well known story of this unique piece of Exeter’s past. This talk, literally turning the pages of the scrapbook, brings together the life of this unique and wonderful woman who spent much of her life dedicated to spreading the knowledge of one of Exeter’s most unique buildings.
Ben Clapp works at the Royal Albert Memorial Museum and has been involved with St Nicholas Priory for 17 years, first as a member of staff when the museum ran the building, and since as a volunteer when it was taken over by Exeter Historic Buildings Trust. He has spent many years studying the building, focusing on the last few hundred years of its history, which until he began looking, was almost completely unknown.
17 April 2025:
Fiona Schroeder
Fictions of the Fin du Globe: Late Victorian Page-Turners and the Fantasy of the Unknown
Fiona is an AHRC funded PhD student, whose research examines the representation of extraterrestrial worlds in the popular literature and culture of the late Victorian and Edwardian period. Fiona is currently a Library Assistant at the Devon and Exeter Institution.