Internet access is rather limited here (in good weather, one has to sit among the bushes at the very bottom of the garden next to the LPG tank and be eternally grateful to the mercy of the nearest neighbour in sharing his wireless;  in bad weather or after dark, there’s none whatsoever), so my reflections are perforce but a modest pendant to Catherine’s thorough review of two days of the colloquium. But enough prefatory warble – it’s getting dark!

I think the colloquium attested to the fruitfulness of interdisciplinary conversation – panels, coffee break chats, and the Mapping Medieval Chester (MMC) project itself all show that we need to talk to our peers from other faculties, institutions and walks of life as regularly as possible.

It also, I think, attested that the digital humanities are here to stay, and that they offer far more than traditional scholarship with added baubles. They offer not only a vast range of novel outcomes (I’m thinking particularly about the multiple pathways into texts and maps that the project website facilitates), but pretexts and frameworks for reflecting on the purposes and methods of scholarship. One way this is evident is in MMC’s vibrant partnership with Sue Hughes and the Grosvenor Museum in Chester – the digital humanities offer accessibility in ways print editions perhaps cannot.

The particular resonance of these issues was apparent in the closing round table, when questions from Gareth Dean, Dan Power, Ralph Hanna and others provoked extensive debate between the project team and the conference delegates. We should look at ways to ensure this reflexivity continues as delegates as others begin to use the website in their research, teaching and personal lives (a project wiki perhaps?).

MMC has been a fascinating project in which to be involved, and the colloquium was equally fascinating. Thanks, then, to our speakers, delegates and volunteers for making the colloquium such a success.

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.

MAPPING THE MEDIEVAL CITY: SPACE, PLACE AND IDENTITY
AN INTERDISCIPLINARY COLLOQUIUM
SWANSEA UNIVERSITY, 30-31 JULY 2009
CALL FOR PAPERS

This colloquium, held to mark the completion of the AHRC-funded research project ‘Mapping Medieval Chester’ (www.medievalchester.ac.uk), will launch the digital materials produced by the project and provide a forum for wider discussion of place and identity in the medieval city, as well as concepts of ‘mapping’ in the Middle Ages and today. The colloquium will feature papers on medieval Chester, but we are also seeking inter-disciplinary contributions relating to the medieval city more generally.

The ‘Mapping Medieval Chester’ project has brought together scholars working in the disciplines of literary studies, geography, archaeology and history to explore how material and imagined urban landscapes construct and convey a sense of place-identity. The focus of the research project itself is the city of Chester and the identities that its inhabitants formed between c.1200 and 1500. A key aspect of the project is to integrate geographical and literary mappings of the medieval city using cartographic and textual sources and using these to understand more how urban landscapes in the Middle Ages were interpreted and navigated by local inhabitants. We hope the colloquium will use our research on Chester as the basis for broader discussions centering on the project’s themes, methods and theoretical preoccupations.

We therefore invite 20-minute paper proposals (abstracts of around 300 words) on any subject relating to the project’s broad themes of place and identity in the medieval European city. These might include:

- Place and identity in medieval Chester
- Writers and texts of medieval Chester (e.g. Lucian, Higden, The Cycle Plays, Bradshaw, medieval Welsh poetry)

- Place and identity in the medieval city
- Medieval border towns and/or border writing
- Writers and texts of the medieval city (e. g. Benedict’s Mirabilia urbis Romae, William FitzStephen, Richard Devizes, vernacular drama and verse)
- Multilingualism and the medieval city

- Theories of space, place and mapping

Proposals should be sent to Mark Faulkner (m.j.faulkner [at] swan.ac.uk) by 23 February 2009.