Connections and Memories: Domus Vallis Virtutis and the Burgh of Perth

Dr Lucy Dean

Thursday 16 February 2023

When a building is lost from a townscape, memories of its existence continue to resonate long after physical loss. Buildings are not mere stones and mortar, nor even their elaborate decoration, they are active spaces housing human activities: they are shaped by the communities that they interact with and influence those around them, providing the spaces for fostering connections and even harbouring disputes. This paper will offer initial thoughts on research into the spaces that the Carthusian Charterhouse ‘without the south gates of the burgh of Perth’ inhabited and the reach of its influence in the burgh, alongside the echoes of its presence in the centuries after the physical building was destroyed and what this can tell us about connections and memories to place and space.

In closing, this paper will take this idea one step further to comment on the potential of lost historical sites to act as a catalyst to bring modern communities together and rekindle connections to place. Perth’s Charterhouse is ‘lost’ but can unlocking memories of its past awaken connections to place in the present? This paper builds on work presented at Christ’s Poor Men Perth’s Charterhouse of the Vale of Vertu and the History, Archaeology and Culture of the Carthusian Order in Medieval Britain and presented in the accompanying exhibition –From Foundations to Echoes in the Records: The Charterhouse and its place in Perth – organised in collaboration with Culture Perth and Kinross on 7 May 2022.

Dr Lucy Dean is lecturer and curriculum lead at the Centre for History, UHI. Her first monograph - Death and the Royal Succession in Scotland, c. 1214- 1543: Ritual, Ceremony and Power - will be published in 2023. She has published widely on ritual, ceremony, kingship and material culture, as well as co-editing Routledge History of Monarchy (2019) and Medieval and Early Modern Representations of Authority in Scotland and the British Isles (2016). Her newest work explores manhood, masculinity and coming of age of Stewart kings, and her most recent article on sixteenth-century marriage, manhood and sartorial splendour was published in Scottish Historical Review (Dec 2021). She is co-investigator on a public history project – working with Prof Richard Oram at Stirling and partners at Culture Perth and Kinross – centred on the lost Carthusian Charterhouse in the medieval royal centre at Perth. She is also a member of the advisory committee for the reinterpretation of the Stone of Destiny when it moves to Perth in 2024.