Smyrna Library's lecture this month explored the history and symbolism of the Coronation Ceremony of King Charles III on May 6. Dr. Amy Dunagin from Kennesaw State University presented a wonderful and informative lecture. What a great excuse to drink tea and wear fancy hats!
Lecture Summary:
We enjoyed tea and light refreshments of tiny sandwiches, biscuits, and scones before the lecture by Kennesaw State University professor, Dr. Amy Dunigan about the coronation of King Charles III, King of the United Kingdom.
Coronations have served to legitimize new English monarchs since Anglo-Saxon times. Many elements of the ceremony date back centuries, including the anointing, which marks the monarch as chosen by God to rule. In the last coronation ceremony in 1953, the anointing of Elizabeth II was deemed too sacred to televise. How might this part of the coronation be received differently now, seventy years later, in the much more secular context of modern Britain? How might the coronation of Charles III serve to shore up the legitimacy of a weakened institution in the twenty-first century?
Speaker bio: Dr. Amy Dunagin is an assistant professor of history at Kennesaw State University, where she specializes in the cultural and political history of Britain and its empire. She is currently completing a book manuscript entitled “The Land Without Music: English Identity and the Virtue of Unmusicality,” in which she explores why the English cultivated a reputation as an unmusical people in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, even as they aggressively asserted national superiority over Continental Europeans in a host of other spheres. Dunagin holds an interdisciplinary doctorate in history and musicology from Yale University.
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