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    [introduction] => Award-winning choral ensemble Stile Antico presents four concerts over the course of three days, taking you on a journey through Renaissance Europe – Italy, Spain, England and the Low Countries.

The setting for all four concerts is Lavenham’s beautiful Grade I listed parish church of St Peter & St Paul, dating from 1485.

Interwoven through each performance will be spoken introductions on the music, given by the singers themselves.

Choose from two exceptionally comfortable and charming hotels in Lavenham: The Swan Hotel, or the Great House.

Our package also includes breakfasts, afternoon teas and dinners in your hotel.

Tickets to individual concerts are also available to purchase, for those who live locally.
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Stile Antico is an ensemble of young British singers who are now established as one of the most original and exciting voices in the field. The group performs regularly throughout Europe and North America and its recordings have received major awards including the Diapason d’Or de l’Année. Working without a conductor, they rehearse and perform as chamber musicians, each contributing to the musical result. Their performances have repeatedly been praised for their vitality, expressiveness and imaginative response to the text.
Their programme of four concerts takes the audience on a musical tour around Renaissance Europe, beginning in Italy and ending in Spain, via the Low Countries and England. Within this, each concert will take you on its own self-contained journey, exploring different cities, figures or perspectives from the era.
For this inaugural choral variant of our ‘Chamber Music Breaks’ in the UK, our audience will take over two hotels in the small Suffolk market town of Lavenham. An almost completely medieval town, Lavenham’s timber-framed buildings were preserved by the 500-year slump which followed a burst of prosperity in the wool trade in the 15th century. The result is one of the delights of England.
All four concerts will be held in Lavenham’s Church of St Peter & St Paul, which has a decorated chancel dating to the early 14th century and a perpendicular nave begun in 1486, famous for its homogeneity and beauty and one of the most perfect manifestations of the style. The fine furnishings include misericords, chancel screen and an exceptional pair of chantry chapels.
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            [subtitle] => Tour around Renaissance Europe
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    [name] => Birth of the Modern
    [code] => 26951
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    [introduction] => Twelve 40-minute talks, followed by Q&As, spanning Monday afternoon to Wednesday morning.

Leading historians of the 18th and 19th centuries offer the latest thinking on a dynamic era of British history. 

Based at the comfortable Grand Hotel in York for two nights, with dinner both evenings.
    [description] => 
The year marking the 250th anniversaries of two of Britain’s most significant cultural figures presents an irresistible opportunity to examine one of the most dynamic and defining periods in British history. The combined lifespan of Jane Austen (d.1817) and J.M.W. Turner, stretching from 1775 to 1851, saw Britain transform from a broadly agrarian to a thriving industrial economy. Until 1815, war was an almost constant feature, having an impact both domestically and on Britain’s global standing. Bolstering the machinations of empire and trade were exciting technological and scientific innovations. All these developments were reflected politically and socially, sometimes in radical ways; they were also expressed in vibrant artistic and literary responses, not least by our two main protagonists. The 12 talks we present here, from leading historians of the 18th and 19th centuries, explore an age of fascinating – often interlinking – themes and personalities. 
We return to the beautiful and historic city of York for this symposium. Our venue is the wood-panelled Grand Boardroom of the former offices of the North Eastern Railway, now a five-star hotel – The Grand, York, where participants also stay and dine on both evenings. 

The Speakers
Simon Bradley
Joint editor of the Pevsner Architectural Guides, to which he has contributed a number of notable revised volumes. Simon studied at Oxford and the Courtauld Institute of Art, where his PhD explored the early 19th-century Gothic Revival. On the railway side, his books include the bestselling St Pancras Station (2010), The Railways: Nation, Network and People (2015), and Bradley’s Railway Guide: a journey through two centuries of Britain’s railway history, 1825-2025.
Steven Brindle
Born in Blackburn, Lancashire, Steven read History at Oxford and subsequently completed a doctorate on the architecture of late-medieval Spain. He has worked for English Heritage since 1989. As Inspector in the Crown Buildings team, he was closely involved in the post-fire restoration of Windsor Castle. Since 2008 he has been a Senior Properties Historian in the Curatorial Department. His publications include Brunel, the Man who Built the World (2005), and Windsor Castle, a Thousand Years of a Royal Palace (2018, as editor). His latest book, Architecture in Britain and Ireland, 1530–1830, was published by the Paul Mellon Centre in 2023. 
Dr Louise Curran
Associate Professor in Eighteenth-Century Literature at the University of Birmingham. She is the author of Samuel Richardson and the Art of Letter-Writing (CUP, 2016) and has co-edited volume 9 of The Cambridge Edition of the Correspondence of Samuel Richardson (CUP, 2024). She is part of the editorial team for the Oxford Edition of the Writings of Alexander Pope and is currently writing (supported by a Leverhulme Fellowship) a book on The Making of Letters as Literature: 1737-1824, which traces the influence of the publication of Pope’s letters from his lifetime authorised editions to the death of Byron.
Professor John Coffey
Director of the Wilberforce Diaries Project and the general editor (in preparation with Oxford University Press). Wilberforce’s diaries and religious journals were written between 1779 and 1833, they amount to almost a million words and form a remarkable record of the later Hanoverian age. As Professor of History at the University of Leicester, John has published extensively on the relationship between religion, politics and ideas in early modern and nineteenth-century Britain and America. Dr 
Patricia Fara
Emeritus Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge, where she was Senior Tutor for ten years. She is a former President of the British Society for the History of Science and her prize-winning book, Science: A Four Thousand Year History (OUP), has been translated into nine languages. She has published widely and contributes to journals including History Today, BBC History, New Scientist, Nature and the Times Literary Supplement. Broadcasts include BBC Radio 4’s In our Time. 
Andrew Loukes 
Curator of the Egremont Collection at Petworth House, Andrew previously held curatorial roles at Tate Britain and Manchester Art Gallery. He is a specialist in British art of the Romantic period and has curated several exhibitions on J.M.W. Turner, along with others on John Constable and William Blake. Andrew is also a former Trustee of Turner’s House.
Dr John McAleer 
Associate Professor of History at the University of Southampton. John’s work explores the British encounter and engagement with the wider world in the 18th and 19th centuries, situating the history of empire in its global and maritime contexts. He was previously Curator of Imperial and Maritime History at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.
Margarette Lincoln
Curator Emerita at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, where she was Deputy Director until 2015. Margarette has held research posts at Goldsmiths, University of London, and at the University of Portsmouth, and gives regular talks and podcasts. Her latest book: Perfection: 400 Years of Women’s Quest for Beauty was published by Yale in 2024. Other books include  London and the Seventeenth Century: The Making of the World’s Greatest City  (2021) and Trading in War, which was shortlisted for the Wolfson Prize in 2019.
Nicola Moorby 
Curator, British Art 1790-1850 at Tate and specialist in British art of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Her early career was spent at Tate (2000-2011), where she variously worked as an assistant curator, cataloguer and as registrar and manager of the Prints and Drawings Rooms. As an independent art historian (2011-2024) she was an accredited lecturer for the Arts Society and a regular teacher at the Courtauld Institute of Art. She has curated exhibitions for Hampshire Cultural Trust (‘Turner and the Sun’, 2017, and ‘Constable: The Dark Side’, 2023), and Turner’s House (‘Turner’s Kingdom: Beauty, Birds and Beasts’, 2025). Her book, Turner and Constable: Art, Life, Landscape is published by Yale University Press (2025).
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