On October 31st 2024, I gave a lecture at All Saints church entitled “A time to mourn, and a time to dance – the All Saints season through the ages“, which explored how the season between Halloween had developed over the centuries and millennia. This was part of a wider celebration of the festival of All Saints that included a musical concert; church tours; a tower climb, a pop up cafe and a number of services of worship.
In the church notices for the Sunday beforehand I wrote the following introduction to the talk.
The start of November marks the beginning of winter in seasonal terms, and is the time of a number of festivals and celebrations – Halloween, All Saints Day, All Souls Day, Bonfire Night and Remembrance Day. In this talk I will explore how all these evolved through the ages from pre-Christian times, through the medieval period to the Reformation and from then to the 21st century. A few other festivals which haven’t made it to modern times will also be mentioned. There will be a large cast of popes and bishops, kings and queens, saints and sinners with a few fairies and witches thrown in. I will of course be using PowerPoint, the academics comfort blanket, with some audio tracks, so if nothing else the almost inevitable failure of technology may be entertaining. But I found putting the talk together really quite interesting, and I l learnt a few things that were new to me on the way, so hopefully others will find it interesting too – and possibly even enjoyable!
This web page contains links to a transcript of the talk, and a re-recording of the talk made after the event. The latter contains the PowerPoint slides I used; the former is just the text. The presentation does not include the audio clips I used in the talk – YouTube would not have allowed me to upload these for copyright reasons.
For those interested in reading further about the development of seasonal celebrations in England I would recommend the following book by Prof Ronald Hutton – from which I took much of the information for the talk.
Hutton R. (2008) Stations of the Sun: A History of the Ritual Year in Britain OUP
Engineering, history and ecclesiology 