Icon? Art and Belief in Norfolk' is a collaborative project, a partnership between the School of World Art Studies and Museology at the University of East Anglia and Norwich Castle Museum and Art Gallery. The main collaborator at Norwich Castle is Andrew Moore, Senior Curator and Keeper of Art; the key researchers at UEA are Sandy (Thomas Alexander) Heslop and Margit Thofner.\n\nThe project will explore one core question: what is the relationship between religious artefacts and the locality where such objects are made and used? It is a well-established fact that religious works of art can have a power or agency of their own. Such works have inspired and continue to draw responses such as awe, devotion or aggression. But where does this power come from? We think it likely that religious artefacts take a substantial part of their agency from the locality in which they are made or used.\n\nTo explore this idea, to provide it with a meaningful factual basis, the project is focused on one case-study: the making and use of objects for spiritual purposes in Norfolk, an area with a history of religious diversity going back at least 2000 years. Romans, Anglo-Saxons and Vikings all came to Norfolk with their own belief systems and their own religious objects. In the later Roman period, Christians settled in this region and - after a period of conflict - Christianity became dominant. This, however, did not prevent other religions from flourishing. For example, in the Middle Ages there were thriving Jewish communities in Thetford, King's Lynn and Norwich. From the fourteenth century onwards and across the early modern period, religious diversity took the form of a bewildering number of different branches of Christianity, including Lollards, Catholics, Calvinists, Methodists, Presbyterians, Puritans and Quakers. In Norfolk the putatively uniform religion of Christianity was only ever an illusion. Then, over the past two centuries or so, a new pattern of diversity has emerged. To number but a few of the faith-groups now found in this region: Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, Jehovah's Witnesses, Mormons, Neo-Pagans, Baha'i and Sikhs as well as older and more recently formed communities of Jews and Christians. This makes Norfolk a particularly appropriate case-study for our project.\n\nIt must be noted that 'Norfolk' was and still is a fluid category. The definition we shall operate with is partly geographical and partly religious: our project is focused on the medieval diocese of Norwich. It covered most of present-day East Anglia since it was bounded in the south by the river Stour, in the west by the Great Ouse and in the north and east by the North Sea. The term 'spiritual' is similarly unstable. For the purposes of our project it denotes behaviour found both within organised religion and within looser and perhaps more personal belief-systems.\n\nThe project and its most visible outcome / an exhibition in Norwich Castle Museum / will explore the works of art and the artefacts that have both embodied and perpetuated spirituality in Norfolk. In particular, we shall focus on moments of religious conflict, moments when questions of faith became pretexts for iconoclasm and other forms of object-based violence. But we shall also consider works of art which have served or still serve as bridges between different faith communities in this locality. Here we shall pay particular attention to the roles that local institutions such as universities, museums and multi-faith groups may play. Finally, the exhibition will examine the roles that art plays within religion and spirituality in Norfolk today. Our sense of what is local has changed dramatically in recent years: a sculpture with religious contents exhibited in Norwich in October 2007 has caused consternation as far afield as Thailand. Can this shifting sense of locality, driven by technological change, help us understand the sheer power of religious works of art?

From footprints left by the earliest inhabitants of northern Europe (on Norfolk's north coast) to the buried prehistoric landscapes of the Fens (exemplified by Flag Fen), from the Neolithic flint mines of Grimes Graves to the Anglo-Saxon burial mounds of Sutton Hoo, East Anglia boasts some of the finest remains from the ancient past, of importance not only for understanding Britain, but also of global significance. And yet appreciation and presentation of these all-too-often hidden treasures remains at the local level, and is often bypassed by international visitors who may go to Stonehenge, Roman Bath or Viking York, but will mostly miss out on what the rest of the country has to offer in terms of heritage. This project will help establish a sustainable framework for presentation and research of East Anglia's heritage within a bigger international picture, including engaging communities in international cultural exchange through archaeology. It is envisaged this international positioning of East Anglian heritage can stand as a model for wider strategic thinking on presentation and management of British heritage. This project grows out of two successful exhibitions on the theme of Japanese prehistoric figurines at the British Museum, and a comparative exhibition of Japanese and European figurines at the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, University of East Anglia (2009-2010). These exhibitions attracted great public interest both in the UK and Japan. During the 2010 exhibition, an artefact from Grimes Graves was exhibited for the first time in the county where it was discovered in 1939. The extraordinary story of this Grimes Graves 'chalk goddess' inspired a series of further academic, youth and civic exchanges between Japan and the UK, demonstrating how powerful archaeology can be in revitalising local communities and for knowledge transfer and public engagement with new audiences internationally. This series of exchanges provides the inspiration and foundation for the current project. At a time of increasing challenges to local and national heritage authorities (including council heritage services and bodies such as English Heritage), this project will help develop capacity within communities to realise further potentials of heritage resources within their locality by clearly demonstrating the 'international significance' of these resources, and the potential benefits in developing international interest. This requires a reassessment of the linkages between archaeology amenity groups (including local societies and Heritage Lottery Fund community projects) with those charged with protecting the archaeological resource, academics, other heritage stakeholders (e.g. tourist boards), and development organisations (Local Enterprise Partnerships). Central elements of the project's work providing exposure to the potentials of international approaches to heritage will be exhibitions and public workshops, and digital media. The east of England has an exemplary record in researching, managing, conserving and developing the historic environment, including pioneering regional archaeological assessments, which informed future strategies for researching and managing what is recognised as a vulnerable and finite resource. In bringing a new 'international' dimension to approaches to heritage in the east of England this project aims to contribute to this exemplary evolving record. Using existing infrastructure (e.g. Festival of British Archaeology, Heritage Open Days), the project will foster new knowledge exchange between stakeholders, develop new means of interactive public engagement with archaeology, engaging new communities and audiences. It will provide access to examples of best practice in this area, hitherto limited to the anecdotal. The long-term aim of the project is to demonstrate how such an 'international' approach to East Anglia's heritage can inform policy and practice into the future, both in the UK and abroad.

The Norman Conquest is rightfully regarded as a momentous event in English history. It ushered in profound social, political, and cultural shifts, including changes in the ruling regime, language, trade and economy, art and architectural style, and the country's religious and secular infrastructure. However, the common understanding of the changes wrought by the Conquest is predicated on what happened to the elite social classes, and on narratives that have been produced primarily from documentary history, often without reference to the abundant archaeological evidence that survives from the period, and which can give us unparalleled insight into everyday life. Archaeology as a discipline has been complicit in this problem, as in comparison to documentary historians, comparatively few archaeologists have used 11th and 12th-century evidence from artefacts, buildings, landscape, diet/cuisine, and skeletal and environmental data to ask probing questions about how and why the Conquest happened, or to interrogate why the material dimensions of this socio-cultural transition were important. This lack of a coherent research framework has prevented archaeologists from playing a key role in either scholarly debates on the Norman Conquest or the public understanding of the process. Archaeologies of the Norman Conquest is a new research network which seeks to redress this balance by examining the cultural, social, and political implications of the Norman Conquest through an explicit focus on archaeology and material culture. Its chief aims are to highlight the new insights and nuanced interpretations that archaeology can bring to this fundamental turning point in British history, and to articulate an inclusive research framework for the 11th and 12th centuries that brings together the scientific, humanistic, academic, professional, and public engagement arms of archaeology. A lack of communication and collaboration between these branches in the past has prevented archaeological approaches to the Norman Conquest from reaching their full potential. The network participants have thus been specifically chosen to break down boundaries between these branches of archaeology, creating a dynamic research community of academic scholars, professional archaeologists, and heritage practitioners. This network is based around a series of three workshops, focusing on the themes of interpretative agendas, methodologies, and heritage and public impacts. Current research is beginning demonstrate that not only is the Norman Conquest visible in the archaeological record at a wide range of social levels and in many aspects of life, but also that if the right questions are asked of the data, the conclusions we can draw from the archaeology often contradict or add considerable nuance to the story of the Conquest told in the documentary record. By providing a forum for the presentation of innovative scholarship and the discussion of new questions, agendas, and research directions, the network will contribute to re-evaluating the long-standing narratives of the Conquest, its process, and its aftermath -- both in Britain and in Europe, in urban and rural areas, in different regions and localities, and at elite and common social levels. The network follows on from commemorations of the 950th anniversary of the Battle of Hastings and the Norman Conquest that will begin in late 2016, taking advantage of this synergy to highlight the significance of the archaeology of the Norman Conquest to an interdisciplinary audience, as well as to raise public awareness of the important role archaeology has to play in understanding this cultural touchstone.

Thomas Nashe (1567-c.1600), one of the most influential writers of the English Renaissance, has not been edited for over 100 years. 'The Thomas Nashe Project' is an ambitious project of scholarly editing: six volumes of all of Nashe's known writings and dubia, to be published by Oxford University Press in 2021 in print and also online, as part of Oxford Scholarly Editions Online, with detailed annotation that takes account of advances in our understanding of the 16th century; a new glossary that makes use of the e-search tools at our disposal; and extensive analysis and commentary. The edition will be edited to the highest standards, taking account of developments in approaches to scholarly editing and new research. R. B. McKerrow's revered scholarly edition (1904-10) is based on his collation of the copies of texts available to him in London and Oxford, although we now know that many more copies survive on both sides of the Atlantic (270+). His textual notes, accurate as they are, can be confusing as he collated his copy texts with 19th-century works that have no textual authority. His explanatory notes reflect the state of knowledge about Elizabethan society in the early 20th century. They are out of date on social history, urban history and the history of London; the relationship between individual writers; the conditions of early modern writing; the nature of patronage and the social order; rhetoric and literary culture; and religion. All of these features of McKerrow's edition and many more are in need of modernisation. By working with Partners of national and international standing, we also aim to both advance and disseminate the knowledge we will gain of this writer and his contribution to English literature and the English language. Our partners and collaborators include, in the UK, Globe Education, Edward's Boys, the Old Palace School (Croydon), where Nashe's play 'Summers Last Will and Testament' was first performed, The Oxford English Dictionary, Norfolk Museums Service (with Great Yarmouth Museums), and in the US, The Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington DC, which holds one of the finest collections of Nashe's writings in the world, and the Mellon Trust Foundation-funded 'The Visualizing English Print Project' team based at Madison University, Wisconsin. By collaborating we aim: (1) to resituate Nashe in his national and regional contexts (London, Lowestoft, Great Yarmouth), (2) to explore Nashe's lasting legacy on the development of English literature and on the language, and (3) to reach a much wider general readership who have an interest in Tudor / Renaissance literature. A unique feature of this project is the importance we attach to the orality and performance potential of Nashe's writing, both his prose fiction and his sole-authored play 'Summers Last Will and Testament', and thus of the relationship between prose and drama in this period. We will have video-recordings of the Edward's Boys performances of this play at King Edward VI Grammar School, Stratford upon Avon, the new Globe Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, and the Great Hall at The Old Palace School in Croydon, and of a 'Read not Dead' reading of 'Terrors of the Night' by candlelight at the Globe's SWP. We will commission a film exploring Nashe's links to East Anglia, as well as the writing of 'Lenten Stuffe' in Great Yarmouth at the end of his life, with readings of this text. With Testbed Audio (a maker of radio programmes for the BBC) we will also record and publish an actor experimenting with reading styles and make a 'feature' about the research that underlies this experiment.

The Medieval Ritual Landscape Project (MeRit) will shed new light on everyday religion in the English Middle Ages (c.1000-1600 CE). Complementary sources of archaeological evidence (excavated artefacts and metal-detected finds) will be analysed at different scales (macro-scale national and transnational, and micro-scale regional perspectives) to illuminate how medieval people expressed their own religious agency, largely unrecorded by written sources. The project will adopt an interdisciplinary research framework, combining archaeological, historical and digital humanities approaches, to reveal how the material practices of lived religion intersected with gender, family and community. It will consider changes in belief over time and in response to social crises and religious transitions, such as the Black Death and the long Reformation, taking a deep time perspective on the religious beliefs and agency of ordinary medieval people. It will consider regional variation in ritual practices and religious identity, through detailed contextual studies of three regional case studies (Kent, Norfolk, North Yorkshire), selected to provide direct comparisons with continental Europe. It will place the English evidence in comparative perspective with Dutch and Danish public finds data, to evaluate the extent to which medieval north-western Europe shared a common repertoire of religious objects and ritual practices. The project will unlock the potential of English medieval public finds data (over 325,000 medieval finds recorded by the PAS, the Portable Antiquities Scheme) and pioneer transnational analysis of European public finds, with relevance to archaeological citizen science across Europe. It will create an integrated database of medieval religious artefacts, including both public finds (metal-detected objects) and excavated archaeological evidence, to enable innovative spatial-statistical analyses to map ritual practices in the medieval landscape. The project will employ GIS mapping techniques to interrogate spatial relationships of religious objects in relation to settlements and natural or cultural features in the landscape, as well as potential clustering of finds that may reveal intentionally 'placed deposits' and the reuse of earlier ritual landscapes. Change over time will be considered through probabilistic 'aoristic' analyses using Monte Carlo simulation, to test patterns in religious material culture in relation to social and demographic trends, such as the development of parishes, pilgrimage, the Black Death, and the Reformation. Social Network Analysis will be used to elucidate and compare regional patterns in the circulation of pilgrim souvenirs and other religious objects. We will interrogate medieval textual sources to gain deeper understanding of who conducted ritual practices, for what reasons and in what spaces, as well as clerical attitudes and commentaries on these lay practices. Comparative insights will be gleaned from public finds recording schemes in Denmark (DIME, Aarhus Universitet) and the Netherlands (PAN, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam), in addition to the rich data set for medieval pilgrim souvenirs from the Kunera Project (Radboud Universiteit, NL). MeRit will deliver parallel strands of impact and outputs addressing i) everyday religion in the Middle Ages; and ii) the use and significance of public finds today, to reach beneficiaries beyond academia, including: citizen scientists, heritage professionals, the public and the Portable Antiquities Scheme. Working with museums and PAS Finds Liaison Officers (FLOs), we will establish a partnership group of 'citizen archaeologists' with whom we will co-produce finds recording guides and creative approaches to object biographies. The PAS will gain long-standing benefits from partnership with the project, including reciprocal knowledge exchange to improve the quality of future medieval finds recording, data cleaning, and legacy materials for the PAS website.