Mapping the Medieval City / Website Launch
Two colloquium participants, Sue Hughes (Grosvenor Museum, Chester) and Rev David Chesters (St John's Church, Chester) discuss the displays
On Thursday and Friday last week (30-31 July) Swansea University hosted the colloquium ‘Mapping the Medieval City: space place and identity’, a very successful event which also included the launch of the ‘Mapping Medieval Chester’ project digital resources.
The project team with Prof Noel Thompson, Pro-Vice Chancellor, Swansea University
The colloquium included a very wide range of contributions across many disciplines, including current work in the fields of literary studies, history, archaeology and GIS mapping. Delegates at the conference came from universities as far afield as Illinois, Athens (Georgia, U.S.), Copenhagen and Jyväskylä (Finland), from organisations in the heritage sector such as CADW, the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Wales and the Church of England Cathedrals and Church Buildings Division, and from institutions within Chester. I’m sure that other members of the project team will be blogging their own thoughts on the colloquium and website launch over the next few days. Here are my reflections on what was a really successful and celebratory event.
For the ‘Mapping Medieval Chester’ team, the days leading up to the colloquium were pretty nail-biting, as we worked flat out to get the digital resources ready for launch. We’re delighted with what we’ve achieved – especially within just a one-year period.
A tense moment before the launch... (with apologies to Keith and Mark!)
We’ll be adding further blog posts over the next few weeks on various different aspects of the website functionality and the rationale behind it. Anyway, the colloquium was a wonderful forum for us to launch the website and receive feedback from potential users with relevant interests and expertise. We’re especially grateful to our Pro-Vice Chancellor at Swansea University, Prof Noel Thompson, for speaking at the launch and showing such support for our work.
The colloquium was especially successful in bringing together scholars from diverse disciplinary backgrounds, with shared interests in place and identity in the medieval city. We shared some very interesting and illuminating conversations across our various research specialisms. I certainly gained some really valuable new perspectives on the medieval city. For example, in the session ‘The Fabric of the Medieval City’ I enjoyed a fascinating paper by Gareth Dean which gave a case study of changing street layout and usage in York, a discussion by Ralph Moffat of a London complaint made against noisy armourers (clearly not good for neighbourhood rents!) and a presentation by Carly Deering which included work in progress on a 3D visualisation of medieval Winchester – a very effective way of exploring space in the city and with interesting implications for our work on Chester. Rob Barrett’s lecture on ‘Leeks for Livery: Consuming Welsh Difference in the Chester Shepherds’ Play’ was a persuasive (and entertaining) blend of theory, close textual analysis and historical contextualisation, which examined the cultural politics of food, ingestion and cultural assimilation (and its limits). The Friday session on ‘Literature, Performance and Civic Identity’, which featured papers from Cynthia Turner Camp, Sheila Christie and Ralph Hanna, offered another set of challenging and complementary perspectives on the city. I was struck by the ways in which, across both dramatic and non-dramatic material, city texts construct groups of ‘performers’ and ‘audiences’ within their narratives.
Colloquium delegates John Law and Ralph Griffiths discuss our project poster
The social side of the colloquium was also very enjoyable – particularly for the project team who deserved a good celebration after the website launch! The drinks reception on Thursday evening provided an opportunity to talk in person to people such as Jane Laughton who have supported and advised on our work over the last year. The colloquium ended, as usual, with a trip to the local pub, where the collective expertise of the project team was pitched against the electronic quiz machine (result: our shaky knowledge of 1970s sitcoms let us down…).
Particular thanks for the colloquium organisation go to Mark Faulkner, who played a lead role in planning the event, and his team of volunteer assistants, Liza Penn-Thomas, Lisa Herlihy and Charlotte Jackson. As I’m sure they are, I’m pretty exhausted this weekend, but delighted that the event went so well.
August 7th, 2009 at 5:00 pm
I just perused the website for the first time and it is marvelous. The combination of literary and geographic materials is particularly helpful. I only wish this superb resource was available when I was writing on Higden! I look forward to using the website for teaching purposes. And I hope the team will consider branching out to other medieval cities.
August 25th, 2009 at 10:32 pm
Thanks for the positive feedback, Kathy – I’m really glad that you’ll find the website useful. Even as we’re bringing this project to completion, we’re already starting to talk about how we might take our research forward. We think that there’s still further scope to work on Chester – particularly from a knowledge transfer perspective – but, yes, we are hoping to look at another medieval city in the future. It would be very exciting to transfer some of the approaches we’ve developed to another location and open up some comparative possibilities. I think we’ll need a bit of a breather first, though!