Mapping Medieval Chester

I was in Chester on Friday; my first visit since MMC culminated with the festival on the August bank holiday weekend last year. I’ve had little time to work on Lucian recently, so it was exciting to be able to the return to the city he described so lovingly. What struck me, along with a crash of brightly-painted rhinos, was how my memory of the city’s topography and Lucian’s text  had distorted the reality of the city itself. My sense of the relative size of different buildings and areas was all wrong. Read the rest of this entry »

At the end of May, three members of the Mapping Medieval Chester project team attended a conference at the University of Toronto, Canada. This wonderful event combined an academic symposium with a performance experiment – this aimed to reconstruct the Chester Whitsun Plays as seen in 1572 by the Protestant preacher Christopher Goodman, who warned that their Catholic content presented ‘peril and danger to her majesty’ Queen Elizabeth I. In a special ‘Mapping Medieval Chester’ session, Catherine, Paul and Mark shared some of our project research on place and identity in late-medieval and early modern Chester. We also came away brimming with new ideas and questions. It was also very exciting to see how many people were already using the ‘Mapping Medieval Chester’ online resources and discussing our work.

Chester 2010: The Creation and Fall of Man

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Following some questions on this Blog about the Minstrels’ Court event in Chester this year, you can find details about the day in this flyer and timetable. The event will be on Saturday 26 June. Thanks to the Grosvenor Museum for this information!

Three members of the ‘Mapping Medieval Chester’ project team will be speaking at the Chester 2010 symposium in Toronto, Canada, to share our research on the medieval city. Catherine Clarke, Mark Faulkner and Paul Vetch will be giving presentations in a special session sponsored by the Toronto Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies. Mark will speak on ‘Schematic Topography in Lucian’s De Laude Cestrie‘, Catherine on ‘A Tale of Two Cities? English and Welsh Perspectives on Medieval Chester’, and Paul will discuss the innovative technical aspects of the project in his contribution ‘Mapping Medieval Chester: Creating a Hybrid Digital Publication’.

The Chester 2010 symposium will offer some unique new perspectives on place and identity in Chester. As well as presentations from a wide range of scholars, the symposium includes a staging of the complete Chester cycle, with each pageant produced and performed by a group from a different North American university or college. We hope to bring back lots of new ideas about the interactions between the plays, their physical environment, and their audiences in the late-medieval / early modern city.

We’ve received some enquiries via our Mailing List about the future of this project and ways in which people can get involved. We’re really grateful for your continued interest and hope to keep in touch via the Blog about news, developments and future activities.

We’re currently working with the Grosvenor Museum Chester, and other partners in Chester itself, to look at ways in which we could share our project research with the local community and visitors to the city. We’re hoping to apply for funding to make this possible and have several meetings coming up to discuss ideas. Watch this space for news as our plans take shape!

On a separate note, we’ve just found out that the ‘Mapping Medieval Chester’ project will be featuring in an Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) report for government and other stakeholders entitled ‘Changing the World: the impact of the arts and humanities’. We’re really pleased to be included in a report which shows the value that this kind of research can have both within and beyond academia. Who knows – perhaps Peter Mandelson will soon be reading about Lucian and Henry Bradshaw over his morning cup of coffee…

The innovative GIS-based mapping work carried out by the project team is getting noticed by others in the fields of digital humanities and historical cartography.

Keith Lilley has been asked to contribute to an event being held at the University of Lancaster in February on the theme of Landscapes, memories and cultural practices: A GIS/GPS digital heritage mapping network, sponsored by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and British Telecom, and organised by Dr Ian Gregory. Of the event, Ian says the “aim is to bring people with humanities GIS content together with technical experts so that we can work towards developing systems that will provide location-specific content to users in the field”. This discussion will have a bearing on future work we have in mind developing further the existing Chester online resource.

Shortly after the Lancaster meeting, Keith is then off to the University of Padua in Italy at the invitation of Alexandra Chavarria, an archaeologist researcher in Padua who is working alongside Professor Gian Pietro Brogiol on a project called Architettura Residenziale Medievale a Padova (further details of which are accessible here). This is quite similar in nature to Mapping Medieval Chester and through this exchange we shall share experiences of mapping medieval cities using GIS and look to future potential collaborative work that builds upon both the Padua and Chester projects.

All in all, as we had hoped, Mapping Medieval Chester is still very much alive as a project, and will continue to spawn new initiatives and influence future research agendas in a wide range of fields.

If you’re in Chester this weekend, there’s a great event at the Cathedral, involving our friends from the Grosvenor Museum. I’ve copied the notice here. It sounds really festive and fun – I wish I could go!

Fancy a taste of medieval festive fun? Then Chester Cathedral is definitely the place to be on Saturday, 5 December.

The Cathedral’s Chapter House will offer a choice of Christmas fayre, herbs and spices, that figured on menus of the Middle Ages against the background of carols. Musical accompaniment will be played on instruments of the period like the gemshorn, rauschpfeife and timbrell. Visitors will also have the chance to revel in the Yuletide atmosphere of past centuries by joining in the dancing, Mummers’ Plays and story-telling. There will also be a chance make beeswax candles – once brought as offerings to the shrine of  St Werburgh, or examine the false religious relics being offered by the  Pardoner - a medieval figure purporting to sell papal pardons or indulgences.

A Medieval Christmas – an opportunity to meet and discover some of the contemporary characters and traditions of the period from 10.30am to 4pm.

Admission is free. The event has been organised jointly by Chester Cathedral and the Cheshire West Museums Service.

This week I was in Chester at the invitation of the Chester Archaeological Society, to give a presentation on our project research. I spoke in the beautiful environment of the Grosvenor Museum lecture theatre, and there was a really strong audience present to hear about our work on mapping the medieval city. It was particularly good to have so many interesting and thoughtful questions, both in the formal Q&A after my talk and whilst chatting over tea and biscuits afterwards.

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Cynthia Turner Camp at the University of Georgia, Athens – one of our volume contributors – has just forwarded this CFP which may be of interest to readers of this Blog. The deadline’s pretty soon, but it looks a very interesting conference panel.

Insular Identities and the Borders of Medieval Britain
Northeast Modern Language Association, April 7-11 2010, Montreal, Quebec

While England, Scotland, and Wales each produced their own bodies of literature in the Middle Ages, their physical proximity at times engendered a sense of shared literary culture, even as the fraught political relations among them complicated any notion of a shared identity. This panel seeks to explore Britain’s insular identities through an examination of its borders, and invites papers dealing with depictions of borders, bordered identities, border theory, or cross-border relations in medieval Britain. Send abstracts to Katherine H. Terrell: kterrell@hamilton.edu by 30 September.

Just a very short post: today I received the total numbers for the people who participated in our Mapping Medieval Chester Festival in Chester at the end of August. The grand total is 1172 (very exact!). It’s brilliant news that so many people came along to the day’s events, and I think it really shows the level of local interest in Chester’s medieval heritage. Thanks to everyone for coming!