'Virtue and Vice' exhibition offers a new perspective on the past

Posted on 8 April 2013

The newly-launched 'Virtue and Vice' exhibition at Hardwick Hall in Derbyshire invites visitors to discover the rich stories and histories of Elizabethan and Jacobean England, as they have been transformed and expanded by our research into religious change, household life, and cultural encounters.

The Conversion Narratives team have worked closely with National Trust staff and volunteers at Hardwick Hall, to create an ambitious exhibition which offers a novel take on Tudor and Stuart England.

High on a Derbyshire hillside, Hardwick feels like a world apart. Yet the Hall, like its builder, Elizabeth Shrewsbury (Bess of Hardwick) was, the exhibition shows, caught up in the whirl of religious, political, and cultural change that transformed the early modern world.

The exhibition explores the impact of the Reformation, including Hardwick's links with the notorious Thomas Cromwell, and the very literal ways in which the Catholic past was recycled and transformed under a Protestant monarch. It shows how men - and especially women - used religious parables and themes to express their own stories and concerns. And it uncovers the global links which make Hardwick an unlikely site to study the long history of the relationship between Christianity and Islam, as well as the influence of remarkable artistic and decorative traditions from across the world.