Kings & Queens 10

10th Anniversary Conference

Royal Patronage: Material Culture, Built Heritage & the Reach of the Crown

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Perth College, University of the Highlands and Islands

Perth, Scotland

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29 June - 2 July 2021

‘Material artefacts with their multifarious meanings, their innate opaqueness and their difficult heuristic nature remind us that history is always producing but has still a great deal more to do before covering all the corners of the human experience.’

 Giorgio Riello (2009)

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This conference seeks to engage with patronage in the widest sense of the word, with a particular focus upon material culture and built heritage. The spaces and objects of monarchies throughout history provide more than the backdrops and props for human activities. Rather the built environment and material culture of royalty had/ have the agency to shape political, social, and cultural events, and some even played a part in the transformation of men and women into kings and queens. Monarchies and rulers throughout the world and across the centuries have sought to invest in patronising the creation of the material trappings of royalty and authority, as well as furnishing themselves with courtly entourages of musicians, artists, poets, scientists, and alchemists, to name just a few. This conference will bring together scholars and practitioners from across a range of disciplines to explore the multi-faceted idea of patronage.

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The conference will be online hosted by the University of the Highlands and Islands, via Cisco Webex video conferencing. We will still be working with our heritage partners at Historic Environment Scotland and Culture Perth and Kinross to bring Scottish flavour to our online proceedings and to retain the features and events we were planning as much as possible in a virtual format. We are sad not to be welcoming folks to Scotland in person, but we are still greatly looking forward to hosting this event and welcoming you ‘virtually’ to Scotland.   

For information about registration and to view the programme, please see below. For registered attendees, once you receive your conference password closer to the conference date you will be able to access more through the ‘Registered Attendee – password protect’ area. 

For registered participants only