Professor Morwenna Ludlow Inaugural Lecture: 'The Workshop: Experiments in History and Theology'

Morwenna’s current work aims to give equal weight to the aesthetic qualities and doctrinal content of fourth century Greek Christian texts. Much modern scholarship has implicitly assumed that a text either has a practical function (teaching a doctrine, refuting a heresy) or is ‘art for art’s sake’. But this assumption fits neither with ancient notions of ‘art’, nor with the Christian texts in question. So, what if one assumes that a text can be both ‘useful and beautiful’? Morwenna’s work uses arts and crafts theorists from Ruskin and Morris to the present-day to shake up present-day scholarly reading-practices and to shed new light on ancient texts. In this inaugural lecture she will develop an off-shoot of this research by investigating the notion of the craft ‘workshop’: can it illuminate our understanding of intellectual communities, both ancient and modern?