Lecture
Rediscovery of Reading Abbey
Speaker: Ron Baxter
Tue, 5 Nov 2024
About the lecture:
Reading Abbey was built as a royal mausoleum by King Henry I; a great architectural statement made by a king who has been described as the most powerful of his time in Western Europe.
At the same time it has remained something of an enigma, scarcely mentioned in the standard histories of architecture because information about it remained scanty. Most of the fabric was destroyed soon after the Dissolution of the Monasteries, and what remained was the site of a siege in the sixteenth-century Civil War.
As a source of building stone in the centre of a growing town, the ruins have repeatedly been plundered. Only recently has it become possible to bring together the scattered evidence into a coherent narrative.
Ron Baxter is an art historian specialising in the medieval period. After a brief flirtation with manuscripts, leading to the publication of Bestiaries and their Users in the Middle Ages (Sutton Publishing 1998), he turned to stone sculpture, and to the Corpus of Romanesque Sculpture in Britain and Ireland (CRSBI), for which he is the Research Director and an active fieldworker. He took his first degree and his PhD at the Courtauld Institute of Art, where he was the Slide Librarian, and later the Conway Librarian, while teaching undergraduate courses.
On his retirement from the Courtauld, he taught at York University (UK), but he is now freelance. In addition to his CRSBI work he frequently lectures and continually writes on art and architectural history and has published a monograph on Reading Abbey (The Royal Abbey of Reading (Boydell and Brewer 2016), and co-edited the British Archaeological Association’s Transactions for their Peterborough conference, which he also helped to organise (R. Baxter, J. Hall and C. Marx (ed.), Peterborough and the Soke: Art Architecture and Archaeology (British Archaeological Association Conference Transactions XLI), Routledge, Abingdon 2019). He is a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries and a member of the Fabric Advisory Committee of Peterborough Cathedral.