With the shortening days and the prospect of Halloween and Guy Fawkes night, we asked some members of the Centre for the Study of the Renaissance about their favourite ghosts, monsters and scary creatures.

One of the perks of research trips abroad is the sightseeing squeezed in when the archives are closed. While working on records of the former bishopric of Constance (now kept at Freiburg im Breisgau), I got a chance to visit the Minster of Our Lady, today a cathedral but originally ‘just’ the city’s parish church. It was built over several centuries in the late Middle Ages and remained untouched by a WW2 air raid. The south aisle contains one of Germany’s earliest ‘Holy Sepulchre’ groups dating from c. 1330. Clearly pre-Renaissance in style, Christ (measuring some 2.18 m in length) is surrounded by sculptures of angels and female mourners. Other artworks include a relief of a Compostela pilgrim crowned by St James (c. 1130), a monumental silver cross of c. 1200 and an altar triptych by Hans Baldung Grien (1512-16, complete with portraits of its municipal patrons). Among the written treasures are fabric accounts surviving from 1471. Now back to work …

On Thursday 5 June 2014, Rosa Salzberg and I co-hosted a very stimulating workshop on the topic 'Arriving in the Renaissance'. Facilitated by a generous donation to the Faculty in support of interdisciplinary work, we were able to invite an international group of speakers, all of whom with interests in migration, spatial mobility and the hospitality trade. We heard papers on channeling visitors to Siena, Venetian / Florentine inns, the iconography of German public houses, cultural exchange in Bristol/Bordeaux, welcoming strangers to Amsterdam and the migration network of a Jerusalem friary. Participants from ten academic institutions found plenty of scope for discussion, including issues like voluntary/involuntary mobility, the social status of migrants, contrasting local attitudes towards immigration, principal entry points, systems of surveillance and conceptual approaches in the field. We all agreed that the topic merits further collaboration and comparative analysis, not least given its relevance for the societies of today.