Rachel Koopmans
Professor Rachel Koopmans
Professor Rachel Koopmans has taught at York University, Toronto, since 2006, where she is currently Associate Professor of History. Her latest publication is a modern English translation of Benedict of Peterborough's Miracles of Thomas Becket. A previous publication Wonderful to Relate: Miracle Stories and Miracle Collecting in High Medieval England (2011), was awarded the Margaret Wade Labarge Prize for 2012 by the Canadian Society of Medievalists.
That same year, she was also awarded a prestigious Insight Grant by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for her work on the “miracle windows” depicting Thomas Becket in the Trinity Chapel at Canterbury Cathedral. The resulting study, accepted for the Corpus Vitrearum Medii Aevi, is the first major detailed analysis of the subject. She is currently working on the third of the Becket Miracle Windows to be investigated in the last few years, and it is this that is the subject of her lecture.
About the event
The “miracle windows” of Canterbury Cathedral, full of action and human drama, are one of the greatest artistic treasures surviving from the medieval period. A new examination of these windows in Canterbury’s conservation studio has revolutionized our understanding of their creation in the wake of Thomas Becket’s murder and the growth of his cult in the late 12th and early 13th century.
This presentation will focus on the latest window to be analysed, numbered nIV, in which the glaziers pictured cures of lameness, paralysis, insanity, kidney pain, stomach ache and malarial fevers.
The Passion and Miracles of St Thomas Becket by Benedict of Peterborough
Wonderful to Relate: Miracle Stories and Miracle Collecting in High Medieval England
Rachel Koopmans
