Love After Life: Public Handling Session with Hayden Peters

Join the Edgar Wind Society for an intimate handling session with Hayden Peters, jewellery historian, collector and founder of Art of Mourning. Hayden will be bringing a selection of mourning and sentimental jewellery from his own collection, spanning roughly the sixteenth to twentieth centuries. Through close examination of the objects themselves, we will explore the ways jewellery has been used to materialise love, memory, identity, courtship, marriage and bereavement. Rather than a formal lecture, this will be a small and conversational session centred on the objects: how they were made, worn and understood; what their materials and symbols communicate; and what they can tell us about the people for whom they carried intensely personal meaning. Hayden has spent many years studying mourning and sentimental jewellery as material and social history, placing individual objects within the wider histories of religion, politics, fashion, symbolism and changing attitudes towards love and death. Numbers are strictly limited so that everyone attending has the opportunity to examine and discuss the pieces closely. Advance booking is therefore required. If you book and later find that you cannot attend, please cancel your ticket so that the place can be released to someone on the waiting list. This event forms part of the Edgar Wind Society’s Michaelmas term programme, Love, Actually. Hayden will also give a public lecture, Love After Life: Mourning, Memory and the Material Culture of Love, at Jesus College Chapel on Monday 9 November at 6.30pm. All are welcome. No prior knowledge of jewellery or decorative arts is required.