Online lecture: ‘Golden Wreaths for Hippocrates: Art, Learning, and Lineage on a Medieval Cup’ with Dr Mary Franklin-Brown, 4 February 2025 (5:30 – 7pm GMT)

Join this lecture on a medieval cup made for Humfrey & Eleanor, Duke & Duchess of Gloucester, and owned by Lady Margaret Beaufort.

Register for a spot over on Eventbrite. 

For the coming months, Christ’s College, Cambridge has lent its Foundress’ Cup to the British Library, where it is featured in the exhibition ‘Medieval Women: In Their Own Words’ (25 October 2024-2 March 2025).

Medieval cups of this shape were used during dinner for drinking wine or after dinner for a sweetened, spiced wine called ‘Hippocras’. This drink was named for the ancient physician Hippocrates because it was thought to promote health by aiding digestion. Cups were large because they were commonly shared between two individuals. At the end of a meal a cup could be passed round the whole table.

The Christ’s College cup is one of the few to survive. It was commissioned in the 1430s by Humfrey and Eleanor, Duke and Duchess of Gloucester. Humfrey was the son of the first Lancastrian king, Henry IV, brother to Henry V and uncle to the ill-fated Henry VI. The cup disappeared from the historical record during the Wars of the Roses, but after the accession of the first Tudor king, Henry VII, the cup reappeared in the possession of the king’s mother, Lady Margaret Beaufort, Countess of Richmond. At her death in 1509, it came to Christ’s College.

Christ’s was not the first learned community to have used the cup. The Gloucesters established a humanist court at their property in Greenwich, now the Royal Observatory, and they commissioned new copies, translations, and summaries of inherited knowledge. Duke Humfrey made generous donations to Oxford University Library. Lady Margaret was an influential patron of early English printers and endowed two Cambridge colleges.

Despite its beauty and significance, the cup has never before been studied as an artwork. No one has considered its relation to other Gothic arts or attempted to identify the many plants in the garlands figured on its surface. How do the plants relate to the intellectual interests and familial affections of the Gloucesters? What meaning may have been attributed to the cup by Lady Margaret and College Fellows of the early Tudor period?

These questions are asked in new research by Dr Mary Franklin-Brown, Fellow in Medieval Studies and Honorary Keeper of the Plate at Christ’s, University Associate Professor in Modern and Medieval Languages, and author of Reading the World: Encyclopedic Writing of the Scholastic Age (University of Chicago Press, 2012). In this lecture, she will present her current understanding of the cup. She will show how the goldsmith asserts the specificity of his craft and materials in relation to the other arts of the age and how the patrons adapt the canons of Gothic ornament to create a shining spiral of references to poetry, heraldry, cuisine, medicine, and alchemy.

The event will be hosted by Dr Sophie Read, Fellow of Christ’s and University Associate Professor of Renaissance English Literature. Dr Read is the author of Eucharist and the Poetic Imagination in Early Modern England (Cambridge University Press, 2013), and she is now at work on a new book, Speaking Sweet: Renaissance Rhetorics of Smell.