Bath History Festival

The following may be of interest to our members and website visitors:

Bath History Festival 2025, Saturday 1st November 2025 at BRLSI, Queen Square.

Presented by Bath Royal Literary and Scientific Organisation and supported by the History of Bath Research Group and the Bath Branch of the Historical Association, the Festival focuses on the thousand years from before the Norman conquest to the early Georgians and is a chance to find out more about how today’s scientific research sheds new light on the past.

The Festival will start at 9.45 and will wind up by 5.30pm. It includes five talks:

Richard III and the double helix 

Professor Turi King, Director of Bath University’s Milner Centre for Evolution, on sequencing DNA to unravel critical historical mysteries.

The people of Anglo-Saxon, medieval and post-medieval Bath: insights from excavated burials from Bath Abbey

Cai Mason, Senior Archaeologist with Wessex Archaeology, who directed the excavations there from 2018 to 2022.

The medieval Bath Mint and Anglo-Saxon and Norman coinage

Bradley Hopper, Head of Coins at Noonans, the specialist Mayfair auction house for coins, medals and jewellery.

Retailing silver in Stuart and early Georgian Bath and the West Country

Vanessa Brett, former editor of the Silver Society’s Journal, is researching a book about the silver trade in the West Country from 1550. She is author of two recent books about luxury shopkeepers whose Bath outlet was in Terrace Walk between 1700 and 1750. 

Restoring Royalty: new discoveries from Bath’s Tudor portraits

Jim Riseley of the Victoria Art Gallery on how tests have proved that a painting of Henry VIII, after Holbein, is a studio copy close in date to the original, and how a portrait of Henry VII is undergoing similar investigations. 

For tickets and further details about the programme see https://www.brlsi.org/bathhistoryfestival2025/