Medieval Festival

Our Medieval Festival happens each February. It is co-sponsored by Bryn Athyn College, and history students from the College assist with giving tours and creating an atmosphere for the event.

The Medieval Festival usually includes recreation pilgrimage tours, stained glass painting, manuscript illuminating and mosaic making. Live music played on replica period instruments fills the Great Hall, and visitors can try their hands at making their own medieval craft.

For more information about the next Medieval Festival, contact us at info@glencairnmuseum.org or 267-502-2600.

VIEW photos from the Medieval Festival.

READ more about the Gutenberg-era printing press.

2012 Medieval Festival Press Release

Family-friendly event Feb. 5 in Bryn Athyn: Visitors to Glencairn Museum can experience medieval life
during festival featuring exhibits, demonstrations, pilgrimage.

Visitors to the Medieval Festival Feb. 5 at Glencairn Museum in Bryn Athyn will be transported to a time when artisans painted glass and illuminated manuscripts, musicians entertained on the bray harp and rebec, the devout set off on a pilgrimage tour, and printers operated a Gutenberg-style press.

The family-friendly festival, with exhibits and demonstrations of medieval life, runs from 1 to 5 p.m. Feb. 5 at the museum of religious art and history, housed in a Romanesque-style castle at 1001 Cathedral Rd.

Highlights of the popular annual event include:

• Medieval stained glass painting by J. Kenneth Leap, Glencairn’s stained-glass artist-in-residence.
• Demonstrations of manuscript illumination, the art of decorating pages with colored, gilded pictures, embellished initials or ornamental borders. Guests may practice the art using preprinted designs and colored markers and also can take a turn using a feather quill and ink to write. The demonstrations are by Sarah Dressler, a graduate of the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. “I’ve had a lifelong fascination with the Middle Ages and Renaissance,” she said. “I learned the skills of the medieval scribe – calligraphy and illumination.”
• Entertainment on replica period musical instruments and information on music and instruments of the time by Paul Butler of Rutgers University, New Jersey.
• Demonstrations on Glencairn’s working replica of a Gutenberg-style moveable-type press by Kirsten Hansen Gyllenhaal of Bryn Athyn. The press is part of the museum’s permanent collection.
• Wool working demonstrations by Eva Mergen of Huntingdon Valley. Spinning is “a wonderful process to watch, and enchants people of all ages,” she says. “The motion of the spindle or wheel is mesmerizing and the transformation magical.”
• Visitors can experience a Christian pilgrimage during half-hour interactive reenactments of a journey to Santiago de Compostela in Spain, a popular pilgrimage site in Medieval Europe. The pilgrims will be guided to various related sites in the museum by medieval history students from Bryn Athyn College, who will equip them for the trip with pilgrimage garb (hooded collars) and maps, pencils, and bags to hold their belongings. Along the way they will encounter a variety of people - beggars, cobblers selling their wares, even danger from a robber and deliverance from a knight.
• A new Glencairn exhibition, “Sacred Stories: Scripture, Myth and Ritual,” opens the same day and features several medieval objects.

Visitors also may take a museum cell-phone tour, watch an orientation video, and stop by the Castle Café hosted by Elcy’s Café of Glenside, with locally roasted coffee by Valley Green Coffee Company.

During the festival, raffle tickets will be sold for an evening of cocktails for eight in Glencairn’s nine-story tower and a view of the fireworks show at the nearby June Fete on June 8. Winning tickets will be drawn at the museum’s Sacred Arts Festival on April 22. Tickets are $10; $25 for three.

Admission to the Medieval Festival is $8; $6 for seniors and students with ID; free for museum members and children under four. Glencairn will offer a $20 family cap on admission for up to four individuals per household, with half price charged for additional guests in the party. Snow date is Feb.12. Those coming in medieval costumes will receive a prize.

Visitors who purchase a museum membership may attend the Festival free of charge, and through May 30 new and renewing members will receive a copy of the recently-released book, “The Bryn Athyn Historic District,” written by Glencairn curator Ed Gyllenhaal and his wife, Kirsten Hansen Gyllenhaal.

For additional information, visit www.glencairnmuseum.org or call Glencairn at 267-502-2600.