Once I was a clever boy learning the arts of Oxford... is a quotation from the verses written by Bishop Richard Fleming (c.1385-1431) for his tomb in Lincoln Cathedral. Fleming, the founder of Lincoln College in Oxford, is the subject of my research for a D. Phil., and, like me, a son of the West Riding. I have remarked in the past that I have a deeply meaningful on-going relationship with a dead fifteenth century bishop... it was Fleming who, in effect, enabled me to come to Oxford and to learn its arts, and for that I am immensely grateful.


Sunday, 18 July 2021

The splendours of Monreale Cathedral


On the Liturgical Arts Journal website Shawn Tribe has a wonderful set of photographs of the majestic cathedral at Monreale in Sicily. This great twelfth century complex, a monument to the piety of the Hauteville Kings of Sicily, as so splendidly chronicled by John Julius Norwich in The Normans in the South and, more specifically, in The Kingdom in the Sun, is shown in its totality rather than as a single book illustration in the post which can be seen at The Metropolitan Cathedral of Monreale, Sicily 


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