The Story of a Book
Michael Wood

• Saturday 17 June 2017, 6.00PM to 6.50pm
• Free admission
  Booking required
• RCH/037, Ron Cooke Hub, University of York (map|getting to campus)
• Wheelchair accessible

Event details

“Books are famous” wrote an Anglo-Saxon poet: “they are the keys to learning”.  Taking the Festival’s theme at its word, historian and broadcaster Michael Wood chooses a single object, a remarkable and treasured medieval manuscript, and tells the tale of its owners and its wanderings.  The book is a tiny pocket psalter written in the Viking Age, whose travels took it from France to Italy and then to Anglo-Saxon England, where its owners included the first king of all England, Athelstan.

Weaving tales around its journeys, Michael will take you through its pages, including fascinating additions made to the book when Athelstan owned it, texts which go back to the earliest age of Christianity in England, an illuminated Irish calendar full of medieval ‘Thoughts for Today,’ and miniature paintings and Greek prayers which derived from Syria in Christianity’s troubled Near Eastern heartland. 

Join us for an evening with a master storyteller telling tales of humanism and hope in the violence of the Viking age;  taking us into the mind of a king in dark times, and conveying the magic of medieval manuscripts in whose pages, ‘the gap of time seems to fall away…’ 

About the speaker

Historian, filmmaker and broadcaster, Michael Wood is the author of several best-selling books on English history including In Search of the Dark Ages, Domesday, and In Search of England, and well over 100 documentary films, among them In the Footsteps of Alexander the Great and The Story of India, which the Wall Street Journal described as ‘still the gold standard’ of documentary history making.  His Story of England, which told the tale of one village, Kibworth in Leicestershire through British history, was called by The Independent ‘the most innovative history series ever on TV’. His most recent series The Story of China was shown by the BBC in 2016, and will be shown on PBS in summer 2017. Of the series, the state news agency in China, Xinhua said it had ‘transcended the barriers of ethnicity and belief and brought something inexplicably powerful and touching to the TV audience’.

Michael was born in Manchester and educated at Manchester Grammar School and Oriel College Oxford, where he did postgraduate research in Anglo-Saxon history, on which he has written many academic articles especially centering on the age of King Athelstan: among them ‘King Athelstan’s Psalter’ in  Royal Manuscripts: the Genius of Illumination (British Library 2011).  His study The Lost Life of King Athelstan is to be published by Oxford University Press in 2018. Michael is a Fellow of the Royal Society for the Arts, the Royal Historical Society and the Society of Antiquaries. 

Along with his continuing film work, Michael is currently Professor of Public History at the University of Manchester, where he has a special concern for public education and outreach, giving regular talks at schools, and Sixth Form and Further Education Colleges, in addition to his community-based TV work. He recently received the British Academy President’s Medal  for ‘services to History and outreach’. 

Waterstones

Books will be available to buy from the Waterstones' stall at this event.

Tickets