Chester in Kalamazoo, Michigan
I’m just back from the 44th International Congress on Medieval Studies, held at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo. The Congress featured two sessions on Mapping the Medieval City sponsored by the Centre for Medieval and Early Modern Research (MEMO) at Swansea University.
I addressed Lucian’s concept of local identity in the first session. I was followed by two interesting contributions from Debra Salata and Laura Trauth. Debra described her work on the notarial register of a fourteenth-century Montpellier merchant, analysing how he interacted with the various administrative and social bodies within the city. Laura, whose research makes use of GIS technology like the Chester project, used various metrics to assess the social differences between centre and periphery in early Modern London. She framed her discussion by making an anthropological distinction between emic and etic maps. Emic refers to an inhabitant’s mental map of her city; etic to the reality of the city, so far as we can reconstruct it. This struck me as an interesting and fruitful distinction. The session was followed by enthusiastic discussion, and anticipated the productive interdisciplinary conversation that we are expecting at the colloquium in Swansea in July.
In the second session, we heard papers from Valerie Allen, Chris Maffuccio and Robert Brandon. Valerie drew on records from the city of York to describe the ways in which medieval roads became damaged, and the sources of funding for their repair. Her paper showed that roads, like other city spaces, were socially produced and socially productive. Christine discussed the late medieval poet Thomas Hoccleve’s poem La male regle, describing how Hoccleve’s ‘autobiographical self creates the city around him’; Lucian arguably does the same thing for Chester. Finally, Robert pondered why paradise is so often presented as a city in medieval texts, addressing this question in relation to the late medieval alliterative poem Pearl. As in the first session, these papers prompted considerable discussion of cities and city literature.