Monday's Lecture

The lecture I went to was titled "Learning, Patronage and Art in the English Late Medieval University." It focused on Merton College of Oxford and proposed that the glass and other art, some of which had been funded by specific alumni, could be read as asserting ideologies particular to the college community. I mainly went to learn more about how to think and talk about medieval stained glass (I learned, for instance, that blue glass is often used to represent black, since black is not translucent), but I also learned about early English universities, which was very interesting. Apparently, just as they do today, universities struggled with the conflict between using what money they had to build more buildings/prestige and using their money to take in more students. They too looked to alumni as one source of funding and hoped that the very successful ones would "give back" by donating.