On March 19, Distinguished Professor Timothy Graham delivered a lecture titled “Archbishop Matthew Parker (1504–1575) and the Preservation of England’s Medieval Past” for the Centre for the History of World Civilizations, Department of History, Fudan University, Shanghai (China). The lecture, delivered remotely, was attended by around eighty graduate students and faculty from various Chinese universities. Following the lecture, three faculty provided commentaries and many audience members asked questions.

Professor Graham has provided the following summary of his lecture:

Between 1536 and 1539, King Henry VIII abolished every monastery in England as he challenged the authority of the pope in Rome and promoted the autonomy of the English church. The king’s radical action threatened the very survival of the record of England’s past, because the libraries of the monasteries had been the repositories of almost every book produced during the medieval period. Professor Graham’s lecture will describe how a great scholar, Matthew Parker, set about rescuing the books that had belonged to the monasteries, and how Parker then studied and published them, thereby initiating the field of English medieval history. Parker, who had been Master of Corpus Christi College and Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge University before becoming Archbishop of Canterbury under Queen Elizabeth I, amassed a collection of more than five hundred medieval books. As Professor Graham will show, these included sources essential for the study of England’s earliest history, such as the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, as well as texts written after the Norman Conquest of 1066, such as the Greater Chronicles of Matthew Paris, a work that includes beautiful illustrations in the author’s own hand. Many of the books salvaged by Parker were written in Old English, a language that had died out during the twelfth century. The lecture will show how the archbishop and his associates set about teaching themselves Old English and will explore how they utilized the information that they found in the manuscripts to fight key ideological battles of the Reformation period, when the Protestant countries of Europe asserted their independence from Rome.