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…)

I’ve just spent a couple of days in the British Library, making some final checks between my edition of the Henry Bradshaw Life of St Werburge and the British Library’s copy of the 1521 Richard Pynson publication (shelfmark C.21.c.40). If you have access to Early English Books Online you can view the digital facsimile of the British Library copy there – though inevitably the images don’t show all the detail, especially not all the marginal annotations. In fact, it’s those marginal notes I’ve been thinking about, as I’ve made my final pass through the Pynson text. One of the privileges of working with an early book is that feeling of following in the footsteps of earlier generations of readers (though please be reassured that I didn’t add my own set of marginal doodles). And as my research paper for this project is on the memory of the Anglo-Saxon past in late-medieval and early modern Chester, I’m particularly interested in what these annotations and comments can tell us about the way Pynson’s text was read by an early modern (late sixteenth-century) audience. (more…)

Today I attended a fascinating presentation by Rick Turner, Inspector of Ancient Monuments for CADW, which was arranged as part of the MA in Medieval Studies here at Swansea. Rick’s talk, entitled ‘Ruins and the Middle Ages: the conservation of Tintern Abbey over the last 250 years’, explored our changing attitudes to medieval ruins over the last centuries, and the complex conservation questions involved. Rick’s theme helped me to draw together some of my thoughts on the memory of Anglo-Saxon Mercia in late-medieval and early modern Chester – and the role of ruins in this imaginative process.

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