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…)

At the end of May, three members of the Mapping Medieval Chester project team attended a conference at the University of Toronto, Canada. This wonderful event combined an academic symposium with a performance experiment – this aimed to reconstruct the Chester Whitsun Plays as seen in 1572 by the Protestant preacher Christopher Goodman, who warned that their Catholic content presented ‘peril and danger to her majesty’ Queen Elizabeth I. In a special ‘Mapping Medieval Chester’ session, Catherine, Paul and Mark shared some of our project research on place and identity in late-medieval and early modern Chester. We also came away brimming with new ideas and questions. It was also very exciting to see how many people were already using the ‘Mapping Medieval Chester’ online resources and discussing our work.

Chester 2010: The Creation and Fall of Man

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Following some questions on this Blog about the Minstrels’ Court event in Chester this year, you can find details about the day in this flyer and timetable. The event will be on Saturday 26 June. Thanks to the Grosvenor Museum for this information!

The innovative GIS-based mapping work carried out by the project team is getting noticed by others in the fields of digital humanities and historical cartography.

Keith Lilley has been asked to contribute to an event being held at the University of Lancaster in February on the theme of Landscapes, memories and cultural practices: A GIS/GPS digital heritage mapping network, sponsored by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and British Telecom, and organised by Dr Ian Gregory. Of the event, Ian says the “aim is to bring people with humanities GIS content together with technical experts so that we can work towards developing systems that will provide location-specific content to users in the field”. This discussion will have a bearing on future work we have in mind developing further the existing Chester online resource.

Shortly after the Lancaster meeting, Keith is then off to the University of Padua in Italy at the invitation of Alexandra Chavarria, an archaeologist researcher in Padua who is working alongside Professor Gian Pietro Brogiol on a project called Architettura Residenziale Medievale a Padova (further details of which are accessible here). This is quite similar in nature to Mapping Medieval Chester and through this exchange we shall share experiences of mapping medieval cities using GIS and look to future potential collaborative work that builds upon both the Padua and Chester projects.

All in all, as we had hoped, Mapping Medieval Chester is still very much alive as a project, and will continue to spawn new initiatives and influence future research agendas in a wide range of fields.

If you’re in Chester this weekend, there’s a great event at the Cathedral, involving our friends from the Grosvenor Museum. I’ve copied the notice here. It sounds really festive and fun – I wish I could go!

Fancy a taste of medieval festive fun? Then Chester Cathedral is definitely the place to be on Saturday, 5 December.

The Cathedral’s Chapter House will offer a choice of Christmas fayre, herbs and spices, that figured on menus of the Middle Ages against the background of carols. Musical accompaniment will be played on instruments of the period like the gemshorn, rauschpfeife and timbrell. Visitors will also have the chance to revel in the Yuletide atmosphere of past centuries by joining in the dancing, Mummers’ Plays and story-telling. There will also be a chance make beeswax candles – once brought as offerings to the shrine of  St Werburgh, or examine the false religious relics being offered by the  Pardoner - a medieval figure purporting to sell papal pardons or indulgences.

A Medieval Christmas – an opportunity to meet and discover some of the contemporary characters and traditions of the period from 10.30am to 4pm.

Admission is free. The event has been organised jointly by Chester Cathedral and the Cheshire West Museums Service.

Cynthia Turner Camp at the University of Georgia, Athens – one of our volume contributors – has just forwarded this CFP which may be of interest to readers of this Blog. The deadline’s pretty soon, but it looks a very interesting conference panel.

Insular Identities and the Borders of Medieval Britain
Northeast Modern Language Association, April 7-11 2010, Montreal, Quebec

While England, Scotland, and Wales each produced their own bodies of literature in the Middle Ages, their physical proximity at times engendered a sense of shared literary culture, even as the fraught political relations among them complicated any notion of a shared identity. This panel seeks to explore Britain’s insular identities through an examination of its borders, and invites papers dealing with depictions of borders, bordered identities, border theory, or cross-border relations in medieval Britain. Send abstracts to Katherine H. Terrell: kterrell@hamilton.edu by 30 September.

Sue Hughes at the Grosvenor Museum has just sent us the following report on the recent ‘Minstrels’ Court’ event – it sounds like great fun. If living history and interactive events capture your imagination, then please do come and join us at the forthcoming ‘Mapping Medieval Chester Festival’ (Saturday 29th August). For further information see the earlier blog post or contact the Grosvenor Museum.

Minstrel’s Court Event

A successful Minstrels’ Court helped celebrate medieval Chester and publicise the Mapping Medieval Chester Festival on 29 August 2009.  ‘Medieval’ Musicians were presented with their licences to play by Reverend Chesters and are now safe from being arrested as vagabonds for another year.

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Following on from the GIS mapping work carried out by the geographers at Queen’s, the project has engaged an in-house cartographer, Gill Alexander, who is using our GIS layers to create a new map of medieval Chester which we hope will prove useful to all kinds of potential users, whether visitors to the city or researchers working on medieval and early-modern Chester.

The finished map will be made available via the project’s web-resource but here is a taster of what is being done.

The aim is also to have separate maps showing Chester Streets, Ecclesiastical Chester, Secular Chester, and Civic Chester, with one map showing the Corpus Christi and Whitsun Plays routes through the city.

Having bought  a copy from the publishers at the International Congress on Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo in May, I’ve recently been reading Jane Laughton’s wonderful Life in a Late Medieval City: Chester 1275-1520. (more…)

Sue Hughes at the Grosvenor Museum has sent us this information about an exciting event in Chester. It sounds like a great opportunity to experience a bit of medieval popular culture! The event will include living history, music, storytelling and dance, and plenty of opportunities to join in. (more…)