Zoom Link to be sent at a later date.
Join Professor Sarah Brown of the Department of History of Art as she presents new research into the patronage of York Minster’s famous St William window, second in size only to the Great East Window.
The talk will introduce Beatrice, dowager baroness Roos of Helmsley (d.1415) and donor of the window. Damage to the fragile stained glass image of her and the disinclination of earlier observers to grant significant agency to women as patron of the arts, has obscured her role and diminished her importance as the window’s donor. Past writers saw her only as daughter or wife of a male patron. We can now demonstrate that she not only commissioned the window, but also influenced its design and deserves to be recognised as the single most important secular donor to York Minster in the later medieval period. Her patronage of art has also been traced to St Paul’s Cathedral in London.
Scholarship dedicated to the agency of women in the arts is a burgeoning field, but is one in which stained glass has remained under-studied. This York Minster case-study, which will feature in a forthcoming book to be published to coincide with the 800th anniversary of the canonisation of St William in 2026, sheds new light on a female patron active over a long period and in several media, underlining the value of in-depth regional studies of this kind.
