Sanctuary, Safety, and Sacrilege

Sanctuary offered safety to fugitives, regardless of their guilt or innocence, for a certain period – usually forty days (a quarantine). It held as a legal right until Henry VIII began its abolition. But the memory of it survives in the form of Sanctuary Cities, Universities and Colleges of Sanctuary. However, the principle of offering safety to refugees, forced migrants and arrivants in general has come under extreme strain, to say the least,  from anti-immigrant policies, fuelled by some vocal elements of public opinion.  Meanwhile the concept of sanctuary itself has increasingly shifted from a place of openness to a private stronghold, from a commons of equality to a bastion of individual rights.   

MW will look at the history of sanctuary, the significance of its present flouting and abandonment, and its potential reconfiguration to meet exacerbated current conditions. 

Marina Warner is a writer of cultural history, fiction and memoir.  She has explored myths and fairy tales in Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary (1976), From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers (l994), and Stranger Magic: Charmed States & the Arabian Nights (2011). Her essays are collected in Signs & Wonders (l994), Forms of Enchantment: Writings on Art and Artists (2018), and Myth, Magic and Marvels (forthcoming, 2026).  Inventory of a Life Mislaid (2021) tells the story of her childhood in Egypt. She has curated shows, including The Shelter of Stories: Ways of Telling, Ways of Dwelling (Compton Verney, Warwickshire till February 2026).  She contributes regularly to the New York Review of Books and the London Review of Books. In 2015, she received the Holberg Prize in the Arts She is Professor of English and Creative Writing at Birkbeck College, a Distinguished Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, and a Fellow of the British Academy. Her study Sanctuary: Ways of Dwelling, Ways of Telling was published in July 2025.