We're kicking off this very busy Autumn celebrating Hildegard of Bingen with a collaboration with acclaimed poet Sarah Law:
Candlelit music by Hildegard of Bingen & other medieval music with Into the Night poems by Sarah Law inspired by Hildegard, Margery Kempe and Julian of Norwich.
Sunday 2 September 2018, 3:00pm
Kino-Teatr, St Leonards-on-Sea on Sunday 2 September 2018
As a side-note, we are pleased to announce our CD is edited and will be available in the Autumn! News to follow soon...
Three medieval visionaries inspired much of this evening's poetry.
Julian of Norwich (1342-c.1416) was an anchoress at Norwich and the first woman in write a book in English. After a serious illness at the age of 30 she experienced a series of visions. These form the basis of her Revelations of Divine Love, a profound meditation on the images and insights she received. Among them was a revelation that God is always with us, even in the depths of the ocean, that the world is made and loved by God, and that the compassion of Christ is like that of a mother. Julian herself was known in her lifetime as a wise counsellor on spiritual matters.
Margery Kempe of Lynn (c. 1373-1438) was a visionary and pilgrim who wrote (by dictation) the first autobiography in English. As well as her many travels in England, Europe and even the Holy Land, she was known for her copious weeping, sometimes described as 'The Gift of Tears'.
Saint Hildegard of Bingen (1098 - 1179) was a visionary, mystic, composer, scientist, artist, author, and monastic leader. Her work is of extraordinary depth, compassion and holistic insight. Possibly suffering from migraines herself, she described herself in a letter as a 'feather on the breath of God'.
Finally, some of Sarah’s poems also mention and are inspired by Rumi (1207-1273), an outstanding and much-loved Persian scholar, mystic and poet of the Islamic Sufi tradition.
Sarah Law (poet) was born in Norwich, studied at Cambridge and London Universities, and currently lives in London. After nearly a decade as a Senior Lecturer in English and Creative Writing at London Metropolitan University, she is now an Associate Lecturer for the Open University and a visiting lecturer for Middlesex and Anglia Ruskin Universities. Her research interests include contemporary poetry and also the medieval mystics, particularly Julian of Norwich. She has published academic work on these subjects in journals and anthologies and will be speaking at the annual MAMO (The Middle Ages in the Modern World) conference in Manchester next week.
Sarah has published five collections of poetry including The Lady Chapel (2004) and Ink's Wish, a collection based on the life and work of Margery Kempe in 2014, which was shortlisted for the East Anglian Book Awards in 2015. She was also published in the anthology The Poet's Quest for God (Eyewear, 2016). She is working on more poetry and a novel, and continues to explore the importance of the medieval mystics in our contemporary world.