'Hurrah, it's leprosy!' How a conservator and a historian are decoding the grisly tales in Canterbury Cathedral's stained-glass windows

A detail from North III, one of seven surviving 12th- to 13th-century Miracle Windows in Canterbury Cathedral. The entire 6m-high window will soon go on display at the British Museum in London—having been reassembled correctly for the first time in centuries
© The Chapter, Canterbury Cathedral
The email message “It’s leprosy! Hurrah!” sent from Canterbury to Toronto last September was as joyous as it was brief. It solved a centuries-old puzzle and opened up a lost medieval world in glorious colour.
The sender was Leonie Seliger, the glass conservator of Canterbury Cathedral, who had discovered leprosy spots on a figure depicted on the cathedral’s 12th- and 13th-century Miracle Windows. The recipient was Rachel Koopmans, a medieval historian at York University in Toronto, with whom Seliger is studying the windows’ graphic motifs. Together they are finally identifying the original narrative order of the stained glass, unravelling stories from the years after Thomas Becket, the Archbishop of Canterbury, was murdered in the cathedral by knights of King Henry II in 1170.

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