This Week is all about The Avars and their Genes, when the The Natural History Museum Vienna opens the special exhibition GENEchangers, based on the early medieval cemeteries of Leobersdorf and Mödling near Vienna. The displays present results from HistoGenes, the large international archaeogenetics project concluding in 2026, and combine DNA, burial archaeology, diet, childhood, health and mobility to reconstruct relationships across generations. Read our essay on how some of the patterns of kinship and the cultural make-up of the Avars persisted into the 20th century.
Also, this week The Musée de Cluny opens the doors to a new exhibition focusing on one man and his lifeworld, Nicolas Flamel. The exhibition is built around his surviving tombstone, testament and archival traces. Roughly fifty manuscripts, documents, objects and later cultural references. The story distinguishes between the historical fourteenth-century Parisian writer, donor and property investor and the myth of his alchemistic inclinations invented in texts circulating after his death. Also, Nicolas Flamel famously appear in the Harry Potter Universe as the inventor of the Philosopher’s Stone. The exhibition runs to 24 January 2027.
Meanwhile the official celebrations of the 800-year anniversary of St. Frances may be over, but scholars and historians gather in Assisi to continue to explore the myth and the man. The 54th International Conference of Franciscan Studies, titled Franciscus gloriosus: making the memory of Francis is this year organised in Assisi. Its unusually coherent programme concentrates on 1226–1232: the contested memory of Francis, his canonisation, the earliest choir legends and liturgy, images of his death, the papacy and the Order, the 1230 translation to the shrine and Gregory IX’s Quo elongati. The conference is streamed by the Società internazionale di Studi francescani.
Wednesday marks it is 960 years since the Battle of Hastings took place on the 14 October 1066. English Heritage has built a dedicated 1066 programme around the anniversary, including new short films and podcasts, while the Bayeux Tapestry is currently displayed at the British Museum in England for the first time since it was made. Though the principal re-enactment at Battle Abbey took place on 10–11 October, there is still much to enjoy. The Battlefield in itself is perfect for an enjoyable walk through the autumn countryside.
More interested in art than battlefields? The Laing Art Gallery in Newcastle opens a major exhibition of more than one hundred paintings, drawings, manuscripts, books and decorative objects examining how Pre-Raphaelite artists worked with poetry. Dante, Chaucer, Arthurian material and medievalising forms appear not merely as subjects but as prompts for ‘double works’ in which image and text interpret one another. The exhibition is a must see for anyone interested in the 19th century historicism. the exhibtion is titled Pre-Raphaelites: Art and Poetry and runs from the 17. October 2026 to the 12. february 2027
The Musée des ducs de Wurtemberg in Montbéliard opens a French version of an archival exhibition, Treasures of Archives: 750 years of Franco-German encounters, developed from the holdings of the Hauptstaatsarchiv Stuttgart and partner institutions. It covers 750 years of relations between Württemberg, Montbéliard, Alsace, France and Germany, beginning in the Middle Ages and tracing cross-border encounters in war, peace, competition and cooperation. The exhibition runs between 17.10.2026 – 14.02.2027