About Mrs Leach's Antiquarian Academy

About Mrs Leach's Antiquarian Academy

After travelling to the late twentieth and early twenty-first century to be trained and gain qualifications and experience in Archaeological Research, Fieldwork, and Education (see About Mrs. Leach below), the Lady Antiquary is opening her own Academy, so that she might take modern visitors back to her own time of the sixteenth - early nineteenth centuries (the 1500s - 1800s), and traverse the more distant past through the landscapes, sites and artefacts - alongside other sources of yesteryear.

Stepping into the present day - for the education and amusement of time travellers, garbed in the fineries of her era, and often accompanied by telling artefacts from of her time - Mrs. Leach aims to inform in an accessible and entertaining manner.

Mrs. Leach brings England to life in the Elizabethan, Jacobean, Civil War and Interregnum, Restoration and Georgian eras (centring on Derbyshire), by exploring sensory experiences: sights and sounds, often the touch - and sometimes the tastes and smells! - considering what people in the past felt and thought through a range of historical material, often adopting an anecdotal, story-telling, approach.

The Lady Antiquary regales Time Tourists with the cultures and customs of earlier periods, seen through the eyes of the Antiquarians of the day, encountering how societies and communities lived and worked together - with particular attention to the home and family; death, ritual and beliefs; and local and national allegiances. By looking at 'the past in the past', travellers might also learn much about the taken-for-granted beliefs and behaviours of their own society.

Mrs. Leach provides talks and lectures; workshops, training and team-building sessions; and is delving into twenty-first century digital technologies to bring her work (including guided tours and activity packs) to wider audiences. She is also developing a range of prints and greeting cards inspired by the historical sites and objects that she visits and sees, and by the society and culture of her time.

About Mrs. Leach

Mrs. Leach is in her time considered to be a curiosity: at best, an eccentric; at worst, a danger to ordered society! Not content with her lot of tending the home, she follows the manly pursuit of antiquarianism; more outrageously, she seeks an income from these exploits, which - especially as a middle-aged, middle-class, woman - borders on scandalous!

Of course, in her lifetime she is barred from the education necessary for such endeavours. It is therefore most fortunate that she is able to move through time to obtain the training and experience required by the lady antiquary (she cannot disclose the means by which she does this for the present, but perhaps one day she will explain...)!

In the late twentieth century she studied gained a University education in Archaeology, becoming firstly a Bachelor, then Master, of Arts (note the continuing use of manly titles!), following these studies with Doctoral research in the first decade of the new millennium, to obtain an Archaeology PhD.

While in the twenty-first century she has shared the knowledge and skills accumulated during this time by teaching adult 'extra-mural' students at the Universities of Nottingham, Keele, and Oxford. She has also published her research in various academic and popular works; and with an interest in antiquarianism (particularly in the studies of women during the 17th - early 19th centuries), she is a member of the History of Archaeology Research Network.

Now Mrs. Leach is opening her own (virtual!) establishment: the Antiquarian Academy, through which she might share her research in an accessible and entertaining manner.

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