Sixth Form students were delighted to attend their first in this year’s series of Enlightenment lectures from Dr Elizabeth Gemmill, a fellow of Kellogg College on ‘Cokethorpe Graffiti’.
Oscar (Lower Sixth, Vanbrugh) said of the visit ‘The Shed was packed with students waiting, with bated breath, to hear what knowledge the guest lecturer was to enlighten us with. And it is fair to say, we were all a little surprised when the words ‘Cokethorpe Graffiti’ were projected onto the board. Dr Gemmill’s vast knowledge, however, did not concern the modern, spray-paint-on-tube-station style graffiti made famous by artists such as Banksy, but instead focused on what modern humans can learn about the people of the Middle Ages from the graffiti they left behind.
Dr Gemmill shared a multitude of interesting facts, images, and anecdotes with us, which allowed us to learn more about the ‘ordinary people’ of history, and even how a piece of graffiti, which the Doctor herself discovered, led to the knowledge that Anne Boleyn had a brother. Our thanks go to Mr Elkin-Jones for organising the lecture, and of course to Dr Gemmill for accepting the invitation to talk to us about a genuinely intriguing topic.’
