Mapping Medieval Chester

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…

Yesterday the project team met at Swansea University with three of our advisors – Rob Barrett (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), Sue Hughes (Grosvenor Museum, Chester) and Simon Ward (Chester Archaeology) – to share our progress and gather some feedback on our work so far.

The project team and our advisors get together at Swansea University

Over the past few weeks I’ve been reading two new books which are directly relevant to our project research: Jane Laughton’s Life in a Late Medieval City: Chester, 1275-1520 and Robert Barrett’s Against All England: Regional Identity and Cheshire Writing, 1195-1656. I’m planning to share my thoughts on each of them here on the project blog. Today, I’m going to discuss my responses to Rob Barrett’s excellent book.

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Well, I’ve just sent off 1200 lines of the Bradshaw text, edited and XML encoded, to the team at the Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King’s College London. I think I’m ordering take-away tonight.

This feels like a major milestone: over the past four months I’ve been working hard on the text itself, as well as getting to grips with the encoding language. In fact, the XML has proved rather satisfying in the end. Whilst I suspect I’ve been using parts of my brain I’ve never exercised before, it’s very pleasing to get a feel for the protocols and patterns and watch the lines of code grow – a bit like knitting a scarf.

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First, let me apologise for the recent silence on the blog. The project team has been working hard to get ready to submit its first data to CCH, enabling them to produce the first visualisations of the website. These are exciting times and we may soon be able to put some of these visualisations online for public comment.

I just wanted to post this, which gives an introduction to Lucian’s In Praise of Chester and some representative samples from his work. I’ll be discussing these with Swansea University’s Centre for Medieval and Early Modern Research on Tuesday, January 20. Online comments are also encouraged. I’ll post an account of the fruits of the discussion in due course!