Mapping Medieval Chester

I was in Chester on Friday; my first visit since MMC culminated with the festival on the August bank holiday weekend last year. I’ve had little time to work on Lucian recently, so it was exciting to be able to the return to the city he described so lovingly. What struck me, along with a crash of brightly-painted rhinos, was how my memory of the city’s topography and Lucian’s text  had distorted the reality of the city itself. My sense of the relative size of different buildings and areas was all wrong. (more…)

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.

As promised, I’m posting a brief summary of the very interesting discussion which ensued from reading the excerpts from Lucian’s De Laude Cestrie I posted a couple of weeks ago. (more…)