Peter: Science Illuminates the Ancestors of Christ in England

The prophet Nathan in 
a stained glass window 

In "Canterbury Cathedral stained glass is among world's oldest", Pallab Ghosh (2021) explains that evidence from a new dating technology has revised the age of  some of the stained glass windows in Canterbury Cathedral to a date before the notorious murder there in 1170 of Archbishop Thomas Becket by four knights who believed themselves, perhaps mistakenly according to some historians, to have been acting on the orders of King Henry II. This earlier dating means that those windows “would have witnessed all of British history” from the king’s argument with his archbishop on, as Ghosh quotes Léonie Seliger, who contributed to the research as the cathedral’s stained glass conservator.  Ghosh also quotes art historian Madeline Caviness, for whom the discovery “jolted her out of a ‘Covid numbness’” when she learned that the new research had confirmed her prediction made in the 1980s that stylistic features of some of of the figures in the series of stained glass windows known as the Ancestors of Christ suggested that they were earlier than the others. The revised theory of the art history is that some of the window panels, dated to before it by a new, non-destructive dating technique using the same spectroscopic analysis that reveals the chemical makeup up of stars revealed the truth, were recovered after a fire had destroyed the cathedral in 1174 and were stored until they joined the new pieces still believed to have been created for the rebuilt cathedral by 13th century masters of stained glass. 

Reference 

Canterbury Cathedral today

Ghosh, P. (2021, July 27). Canterbury Cathedral stained glass is among world's oldest. BBC.  https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-57768815 

You can see my planning notes, on which I spent 61 minutes, and the Google Doc I worked in, where my first draft took exactly 30 minutes to write. I then went over it a couple times to edit.