Tagged: Creative Fellow

Laura Sangha and Min Wild. All photographs courtesy of Tom Hurley, Devon Digital. ‘What a brilliant night! Wills: dry, formal, boring? This was story telling at its best: intriguing, engaging, human!’ ‘We really didn’t know what to expect but we were blown away by the talent on show! So many musical genres, beautiful lyrics and […]

Laura Sangha What do you get if you combine a historian, a musician, and 25,000 historic wills? All sorts of fun things! In this post I reflect on what composer, arranger, songwriter and performer Chris Hoban and I got up to during our six-month Arts and Culture Creative Fellowship. For background about the fellowship, see […]

Emily Vine **This will inspired a Chris Hoban song! Read his lyrics at the end of the post.** This month’s post examines the will of Margaret ‘Pennington’ Cooke (d. 1552), a widow of Hornchurch in Essex. Margaret Cooke moved in prominent circles and had royal connections – she was a lady-in-waiting to both Catherine of Aragon and […]

This month’s post has been inspired by conversations with the project’s Creative Fellow, composer, arranger, performer and lyricist Chris Hoban. Chris has recently been analysing the wills of sextons and thinking about the symbolism of the body being laid to rest. This is a longstanding interest of his – you can listen to one of his […]

This month’s featured testament belongs to John Pooke, a citizen and haberdasher of London who made his will in 1607. It was only once I sat down to read Pooke’s will carefully, from start to finish, that it suddenly unfolded like a little novella before me, complete with knotty little plot twists. Perhaps this enlightenment […]

Laura Sangha At the end of last year I was lucky enough to be chosen as a host for an Exeter Arts and Culture Creative Fellow for the project ‘Wills as Windows onto Past Lives’. The fellowships are exploratory placements offering creative practitioners the opportunity to engage with staff at the University, using current research […]

**This will inspired a Chris Hoban song! Read his lyrics at the end of the post.** Many thanks to the Zooniverse users who contributed to conversations about this will on our talkboards, including Will and Barbara, and @sk001, @studentius, @Tearle, @ManyHeaded, and @HJSmith .You can view the discussion of this will here. To join in […]

Emily Vine **This will inspired a Chris Hoban song! Read his lyrics and watch a recording at the end of the post.** The end of October and the beginning of November marks ‘Allhallowtide’ – the time of the year when Western Christians, including in early modern England, have traditionally turned their thoughts to the dead […]

**This will inspired a Chris Hoban song! Read his lyrics at the end of the post.** Emily Vine This ‘Will of the Month’ post features the will of a man ‘local’ to the University of Exeter: Alderman Thomas Hunte, who died in 1548 in the reign of Edward VI, having been mayor of the city […]

**This will was part of the inspiration for a Chris Hoban song! Read his lyrics at the end of the post.** Emily Vine In this month’s post we explore the will of John Tylney, a man who had made his living from writing the wills of others. Tylney had lived and died in Bury St […]