Museum Current: "The Medieval Cathedral as Museum": Lecture by Harvard University Museum Studies Professor Dr. Mary Malloy

As part of its new Museum Current lecture series, which focuses on recent scholarship, discoveries, and trends in Museum Studies, the McMullen Museum welcomes Harvard Museum Studies Professor Dr. Mary Malloy whose illustrated lecture will describe a number of important European cathedrals as destinations for pilgrims and as early museums with remarkable collections. Please RSVP at http://bit.ly/2lrRxIJ.

During the Middle Ages, a pilgrimage provided the most popular and convenient form of travel for people with means. The destinations were cathedrals and their collections of relics, reliquaries, and, coincidentally, great works of art. Medieval cathedrals met many of the criteria we use today to define museums: they had collections, an audience (both local and foreign tourists), an educational agenda (Catholicism), were open to the public, and provided the foundation for a growing tourist economy in many cities.

Mary Malloy has been on the faculty of the Museum Studies Program at the Harvard Extension School for more than a decade, and won the teaching prize there in 2010. She earned her MA in American Studies at Boston College, and a PhD at Brown University. The author of three novels and four works of nonfiction maritime history, Malloy has walked across England to trace the pilgrimage route of Chaucer’s “Wife of Bath,” and has followed the character’s path to Rome, Bologna, Santiago de Compostela, and Cologne to look at cathedrals and their collections. She is currently working on a book on the history of museums.

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