Posted April 8, 2020 3:56 pm by William Purkis under Collections History
On 25 March 2020 the custodians of the church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem closed the building’s doors indefinitely, thus preventing pilgrims from worshipping at the sacred sites contained within for the first time in hundreds of years. The experience of being unable to visit the church in person would have been familiar to... Read more »
Posted September 25, 2017 4:21 pm by Abigail Turner under Collections Guest blogs
Katie Gibbs is in her third year of studying history at Queen Mary University of London. She’s pretty confident that coins and clocks and what the church was like 800 years ago are things everyone should be interested in. On 1 May 1191, en route to the Holy Land on the Third Crusade, Richard I... Read more »
Posted September 15, 2017 11:59 am by Abigail Turner under Collections Guest blogs
Jack Hanson is an undergraduate at Queen Mary University of London. He first became interested in the Crusades during his A-levels. He decided to write this essay on the coins of Tancred, as the Museum of the Order of St John has an excellent collection. He has also been working with the Museum to catalogue... Read more »
Posted September 27, 2016 2:53 pm by Abigail Turner under Collections Impact Volunteering
This summer Flora Raybould joined the Bearers of the Cross team for five weeks to take on the mammoth task of sorting, identifying and cataloguing the Cyprus coins from our crusader coin collection. She approached the task with great enthusiasm and quickly got to grips with the extensive collection, making impressive progress and a significant... Read more »
Posted September 7, 2016 2:02 pm by Rosie Weetch under Collections
Three objects in the Museum of the Order of St John‘s (MOSJ) collection have intrigued the project team since the start. They are three lion head handles or knockers, discovered in the ruins of the Muristan in Jerusalem, the site of the hospital used by the Order of St John from around AD 1080. It is this... Read more »
Posted May 24, 2016 4:03 pm by Rosie Weetch under Collections
As we have been going through all the medieval objects at the Museum of the Order of St John we have been able to identify some wonderful things, but a small number of artefacts have us stumped! These are items that we cannot identify or find parallels for, so we are going to post a... Read more »
Posted April 29, 2016 11:24 am by Rosie Weetch under Collections Impact Project updates
On Friday 22nd April we had the privilege of leading one of the regular medieval handling sessions hosted by the British Museum and the Medieval Touch research group from the Courtauld Institute. We used the session to introduce the Bearers of the Cross project, and to explore two of the key themes that underpin our research: lived religion and... Read more »
Posted April 26, 2016 11:48 am by Abigail Turner under Collections History
The Museum of the Order of St John has opened its doors to the visiting public each week since 1978, but the history of the Museum and its collections goes back much further than this. As early as 1838 gifts of books were made to the Order, with the collection slowly but surely growing to... Read more »