The Canterbury Roll is a 5m-long, 15th-century genealogical text, created in the late 1420s to early 1430s and purchased by UC in 1918.
The Roll contains about 8000 words, mostly in Latin, is made of parchment or sheep skin and rolls up like a paper towel.
It records family lineages from the biblical Noah to the last of the Plantagenet English kings.
The Roll was edited at least three times in the 55 years or so after its creation but then disappeared until 1918 when it was sold to Canterbury College by Sybilla Maude, better known as Nurse Maude, for £50.
The text remained difficult to access until a digitised edition was published by Canterbury University Press in 2017.
Since then, it has become the focus of the Canterbury Roll Project, a joint venture between UC and Nottingham Trent University in the United Kingdom.
Next Monday (October 16) a free, live-streamed Tauhere UC Connect public lecture will focus on two strands of the ongoing investigation into the Roll, presented by two UC historians.
Using the Roll as an example, she will discuss the synergies and divergences between these two worlds and their conceptions.
“These synergies can contribute to a new way of approaching the study of medieval history in New Zealand,” Williams says.
UC historian Dr Chris Jones will examine how the Roll has opened new doors to the exploration of similar documents in the United Kingdom.
Much of this new scientific analysis has been carried out in partnership with Nottingham Trent University, and in 2022 it saw the team working on the Roll receive the Queen’s Anniversary Prize for Higher and Further Education in Advancing Cultural Heritage Science.
“At the same time, new work is emerging on the significance of the Roll as a cultural artefact,” Jones says.
