April 24, 2024
The West London Partnership is pleased to confirm the following Gresham Lectures taking place at St Paul’s Girl’s School.
These lectures are open to Y12 & Y13 students from all WLP schools. To confirm your place please use the below sign up forms. Please be aware that places are limited!
Professor Martin Daunton
Memorials to slave owners should, we are told by the government, be retained and explained; and that to remove them would be a denial of history. This lecture shows that we need to understand how decisions to erect a statue or memorial – such as to Edward Colston in Bristol – were themselves contested and historically contingent rather than expressions of a shared common heritage. If retention is the default option, who does the explaining and on what terms? One person’s objectivity can be read as both condemnation and apology. This lecture considers some leading examples where these issues have been contested.
Professor Ronald Hutton
Between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries, most European nations feared witchcraft and tried and put people to death for allegedly practising it, in a way that they did not do either before or since. This talk is designed to answer the questions of why they did so and why they stopped doing so. It will also consider the size and duration of the early modern witch hunts, why and how they occurred in particular places and not in others, and why the majority of people accused of witchcraft were women.