The British Museum
Great Russell Street, London, WC1B 3DG
3 October 2022
Convened by Rachel King, Amina Wright and Tessa Murdoch
2029 will mark 200 years since The Catholic Emancipation Act permitted Catholics to sit in the House of Commons. It was the culmination of a fifty-year campaign to remove significant barriers to Roman Catholic involvement in British and Irish society that had been place since 1536.
Despite the ostensive removal of impediments to engagement with Catholic material culture in 1829, artefacts (and collections of them) relating to the experience of British and Irish Catholicism in the period 1536–1829 remain little known and poorly understood.
The event brought curators, custodians, and active users of British and Irish Catholic material heritage together to acquire and share expertise about the location, nature and extent of monastic, college, and seminary collections, as well as other non-National concentrations.
Core to the event was the position that British and Irish Roman Catholic material heritage is more than evidence of faith. Artefacts and their potent stories also exemplify intergenerational inheritance and transmission, extensive cultural horizons, complex historical memory, tolerance, empowerment, and engagement, as well as of oppression, rejection, disenfranchisement, dislocation, and exile.
This workshop provided a safe non-judgmental space dedicated to the demystification of Catholic Material Culture. Its foremost goal was the promotion of understanding and engagement between stakeholders, opening avenues to future collaborations and proposals for a programme of events towards and in 2029.
This workshop was conceived with a view to allowing curators and other interested parties to develop the knowledge, language, and network needed to facilitate access to, present, interpret and mobilise Catholic heritage for multi-cultural audiences of diverse spiritual or no faith backgrounds.
The main points raised during the day related to:
- Defining ‘Catholic material culture’ – it can include liturgical and sacramental objects, art
collections and social history - Risks to collections, e.g., from closure of monastic houses and seminaries
- Lack of inventories
- Lack of understanding of museum collections
- No formal structures for sharing of knowledge and expertise (archives are better served than
artefact collections, with the Catholic Archives Society and the Catholic Record Society) - And finally, is 2029, the bicentenary of the Catholic Emancipation Act, a suitable event to commemorate Catholic material culture? Awareness of the Act and its significance is minimal, even in the Catholic community. Should events cover the broader Reforms of the decade of Reform, e.g., Factory Acts, Parliamentary reform, abolition of slave trade?
The main outcome from the day was a clear understanding of the need, and strong desire, to
continue the day’s discussions with a more formal and inclusive network. This ultimately resulted in the creation of the British Catholic Material Culture 1538-1829 Research Group.
