Minerva Lectures at Bromley High School are a series of high quality lectures delivered by outside speakers to broaden student horizons and provoke thought and discussion. Speakers are often academics, scientists, experts in various fields.

Year 11 English students were lucky to welcome Dr Alice Leonard from Warwick University who came to speak to them about one of their GCSE texts, Macbeth.

Dr Leonard specifically focused on the role of the witches, and the girls were all tasked to examine pictures of the witches that had been taken from different editions of the play over the years. In groups they had to discuss what they could see in the pictures and how the witches were represented. The pupils shared ideas with the rest of the group, which covered areas such as the context behind the prosecution of witches at the time, to how their appearances reflected their power.

The workshop ended with an extremely interesting conversation about why Shakespeare chose to have the witches speak using rhyming couplets, and whether the witches were as powerful and important as we first thought.

“We all found the workshop very engaging, and especially helpful for our GCSE’s, as we now have even more complex and unique ideas to talk about in our exams.” Susannah, Year 11