We held our AGM and study day at St Alban’s Holborn last Saturday. It was a strange day to be in London: King Charles III was being proclaimed at St James’s Palace and we began with a minute’s silence to commemorate the late Queen.

We had a varied and at times challenging series of lectures. Roger Bowdler spoke with impressive even-handedness about the controversy over the Rustat monument in Jesus College, Cambridge. Subsequent discussion was courteous but made clear how strong opinions were on this complex case. After lunch, Christian Steer looked at the remarkable medieval brass of a London tailor (the inscription panel survives, bizarrely, having been reused in a seventeenth-century monument in a Buckinghamshire church). Unusually, the brass describes his other commemorative strategies: a chantry and an obit. Dr Lydia Hansell also looked at complex commemorative strategies – in this case, the evidence for the tomb(s) of Cardinal Jean Rolin (1408-83) in his cathedral at Autun. She made a compelling case for viewing the lost carving of the Entombment in the cathedral as part of a campaign to promote a Crusade following the fall of Constantinople. Dr Lena Wahlgren-Smith brought her skill as a medieval Latinist to bear on two fifteenth-century Latin verse epitaphs  in Hampshire churches, arguing that they were evidence for widening skills in Latin literacy and the transition from medieval Latin to the humanist classical revival. She also explored the ways in which people with varying levels of literacy could approach these inscriptions at different levels.

Then there was the AGM. The official business was dealt with fairly promptly. We are in the process of becoming a Charitable Incorporated Organisation (which will make life easier for Council members and trustees), though some formailities still have to be dealt with. The President, officials and ordinary members of council were re-elected nem. con. and we welcome two new members of Council, Roger Bowdler and Moira Gittos. Both have served on Council before and will be well known to members.

The minutes will be available on this site shortly: meanwhile, the reports and accounts can be found below.