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’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 project team and our advisors get together at Swansea University

This was an important opportunity for us all to report on work in progress and celebrate what we’ve achieved so far. It was also quite a nail-biting moment, as Paul revealed the first glimpses of how the texts will look on the website, and showed us how the CCH team envisage inter-linking the texts and the map. This was something that the less technically-minded of us (myself most definitely included!) had been eagerly (and nervously) anticipating. The initial samples we’ve seen look really effective and really do enable the different source materials to relate meaningfully to each other.

Obviously, a particular aim of this meeting was to gain feedback from our advisors on how the project is progressing. In particular, our advisory team were able to make informed suggestions about how our different audiences might use the web materials and how we can make them accessible and user-friendly.

The meeting was exhausting, but very productive, and it’s really exciting seeing the project materials come together.  We ended the day with well-deserved drinks in the local pub – and a rather different (but equally intense) discussion about Doctor Who past and present…

Keith shows us some of the current mapping work

Another one for the album...

Rob is interested in the ways in which Cheshire texts ‘work together to complicate persistent academic binaries of metropole and margin, centre and periphery, and nation and region’ (p. 1). His study argues that, whilst the relationships between Cheshire and Wales have been investigated in various ways by medievalists, the complex interactions between Cheshire and the wider nation of England deserve further attention. The first publication in a new series, Reformations: Medieval and Early Modern, edited by David Aers, Sarah Beckwith and James Simpson, Rob’s book is explicit about its aim to challenge existing scholarly paradigms and assumptions. He asks new questions about how national and local identities are produced, emphasising inter-dependence, interaction and sometimes antagonism, and deliberately works across the transitions and continuities from medieval to early modern.

The book’s first chapter has the most striking relevance for our current work on the ‘Mapping Medieval Chester’ project. In ‘From Cloister to Corporation: Imagining Chester in Benedictine Encomium and Saint’s Life’, Rob explores Lucian’s De Laude Cestrie and Henry Bradshaw’s Life of St Werburge – two of our central project texts. I really like the way Rob describes Lucian’s vision of the city as a text needing explication, commenting on how ‘the simple act of walking around the city replicates the textual practice of the exegete’ (p. 42). Rob calls attention to the ways in which Lucian’s description appropriates the entire urban space, figuring and interpreting the city according to monastic ideology and authority. He notes that ‘Lucian… uses the vocabulary of monastic discourse to shift the abbey’s legal and political boundaries, to make them coterminous with those of Chester itself’ (p. 35).

Rob examines how Lucian invests the city landscape with symbolic potentials, and acknowledges the resulting ‘deliberate deformations his spatial hermeneutic works on the cityscape of Chester’ (p. 30). I’m also interested in Lucian’s spatial imagination – clearly influenced by the medieval mappae mundi tradition. Increasingly, I suspect there’s a link between Lucian’s cartographic imagination and the Easter Tables located at the beginning of the manuscript. We know that medieval maps and Easter Tables often travelled together – is this further evidence that Lucian imagines and constructs his text as a project in spatial (and temporal) mapping?

Rob sees a big difference in Henry Bradshaw’s later Life of St Werburge. Here he finds evidence of the power struggles between monastic and secular authorities within Chester, and the increasingly precarious insistence of St Werburgh’s on its role as guardian and centre of the city. Rob also comments interestingly on the London printing of the Life by Richard Pynson (the only text which now survives), exploring how this local hagiography is re-shaped and incorporated into ‘the emergent anti-Lutheran effort’ (p. 58) and is ‘mobilized… in defense of the national religious body against a foreign invader’ (p. 53). I think my work on the memory of Anglo-Saxon Mercia in the Life of St Werburge can bring some interesting new perspectives to this argument. There’s much more to say about how the text imagines an authentic, continuous religious tradition which shapes Cestrian (and wider national) identity, and also the ways in which Mercian identity may be contiguous with – or subtly different from – Englishness.

I particularly enjoyed the Epilogue, in which Rob looks at ongoing negotiations of Cheshire identity - often making use of pre-modern materials – in the twenty-first century. Rob draws together a range of sources such as the revived performances of the Cycle Plays, literary imaginings of Cheshire and political changes (including the establishment of the new unitary authority) which continue to demonstrate the positioning of Cheshire identity in response and counterpoint to national (and even global) trends and pressures.

Rob will be coming all the way from Chicago to Swansea this week for our Porject Co-ordination Team / Advisory Committee meeting. I’m looking forward to discussing our shared research interests then!

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.

Henry Bradshaw’s Life of St Werburge has presented its own particular demands at the encoding stage. The text is extremely ambitious in its historical range and scope – almost like a vast encyclopaedia of medieval Chester – and so there are a huge number of places, people and events which need marking up. All this information encoded within the text – searchable, linked to the other project texts and map, as well as other traditional print and digital materials – should mean that it’s a really rich resource. There’s still much more to do, finalising subject taxonomies and hierarchies, to ensure that all the project data is interlinked and organised in meaningful ways.

As a poet, Bradshaw hasn’t received a good press from critics in the past. But after my close work with the Life of St Werburge I’ve found some interesting stylistic features which I think are worthy of more discussion. I hope to share my thoughts on some of them via the blog in the next few weeks.

Meanwhile, I have a decision to make tonight: pizza, Chinese, or Indian?

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!