The book brings together contributions from scholars across a range of disciplines (including literary studies, history, geography and archaeology) to investigate questions of space, place and identity in the medieval city. Using Chester as a case study – with attention to its location on the border between England and Wales, its rich multi-lingual culture and surviving material fabric – the essays seek to recover the experience and understanding of the urban space by individuals and groups within the medieval city, and to offer new readings from the vantage-point of twenty-first century disciplinary and theoretical perspectives.

 The volume includes new interpretations of well-known sources and features such as the Chester Whistun Plays and the city’s Rows and walls, but also includes discussions of less-studied material such as Lucian’s In Praise of Chester – one of the earliest examples of urban encomium from England and an important text for understanding the medieval city – and the wealth of medieval Welsh poetry relating to Chester.

 Certain key themes emerge across the essays within the volume, including relations between the Welsh and English, formulations of centre and periphery, nation and region, different kinds of ‘mapping’ and the visual and textual representation of place, borders and boundaries, uses of the past in the production of identity, and the connections between discourses of gender and space. The volume seeks to generate conversation and debate amongst scholars of different disciplines, working across different locations and periods, and to open up directions for future work on space, place and identity in the medieval city.

The current Contents page looks like this…

Medieval Chester: Views from the Walls (Catherine A.M. Clarke)

Urban mappings: Visualizing Late Medieval Chester in Cartographic and Textual Form (Keith D. Lilley)

Framing Medieval Chester: the Landscape of Urban Boundaries (C.P. Lewis)

St Werburgh’s, St John’s and the Liber Luciani De Laude Cestrie (John Doran)

The Spatial Hermeneutics of Lucian’s De Laude Cestrie (Mark Faulkner)

‘3e beoð þe ancren of Englond . . . a þah 3e weren an cuuent of . . . Chester’: Liminal Spaces and the Anchoritic life in Medieval Chester (Liz Herbert McAvoy)

Sanctity and the City: Sacred Space in Henry Bradshaw’s Life of St Werburge (Laura Varnam)

Plotting Chester on the National Map: Richard Pynson’s 1521 printing of Henry Bradshaw’s Life of Saint Werburge (Cynthia Turner Camp)

The Outside Within: Medieval Chester and North Wales as a Social Space (Helen Fulton)

Mapping the Migrants: Welsh, Manx and Irish Settlers in fifteenth-century Chester (Jane Laughton)

Leeks for Livery: Consuming Welsh Difference in the Chester Shepherds’ Play (Robert W. Barrett, Jnr)

Remembering Anglo-Saxon Mercia in late-medieval and early-modern Chester (Catherine A.M. Clarke)

Early in De laude Cestrie, Lucian casually remarks plerumque quod nec civis attendit, peregrinus appendit (‘often a stranger ponders what a citizen does not even consider’). And so it was with this visit. I was lucky enough to be showing a visitor round the city, and her fresh eyes discerned new questions.

Naturally my Lucian-lite tour took in the churches (St Peter’s, St Michael’s, St Werburgh’s, St John’s) and the walls. My obdurate visitor persisted in asking at every stage “so what was in the space between them?”. This is what I usually call a ‘difficult’ question (i. e. one I can’t answer), but the fact that I couldn’t answer it satisfactorily was itself revelatory. I’d become so attuned to Lucian’s ecclesiastical topography that I’d forgotten, to a certain extent, that Chester was not just a religious space, but also a commercial, residential and social environment.

A further surprise was how big the intra-mural area of Chester is. I wrote an article last summer that discussed a day Lucian describes in which he walked from St Werburgh’s to St Michael’s to hear mass,  to St John’s to pray, then on to the castle to conduct some abbey business. The factor I now recognise I neglected to consider is the time this would have taken Lucian; these locations are a significant distance apart. Lucian’s progress between them could have taken two or three hours, a rate of progress any nineteenth-century flâneur would regard with pride.

My experience, and Lucian’s remark, contain a broader lesson, I think; the lesson that we, as academic citizens, must look to share our work with anyone interested. Strangers can pose and answer important questions which are all to easy to neglect. Those hostile to the idea of ‘impact’ would do well to ask not what they can do for the public, but what the public can do for them.

Fecunde unum debriat quod alteri de facili profluebat (‘What readily flows forth from one, completely intoxicates another’). So Lucian remarks just before the words I have been discussing here. This remark seems just as true, and for that reason I must thank all the peregrini who came to the Festival last August, and particularly the peregrina who accompanied me on Friday. I am ‘completely intoxicated’ (or as we would now say, extremely grateful).

Chester 2010: The Creation and Fall of Man

The symposium included sessions on topics such as ‘The Audience’ and ‘The City’, which reminded us once again of the many different identities, cultural traditions and practices in medieval and early modern Chester, offering lots of new perspectives on the city. In our own ‘Mapping Medieval Chester’ session, sponsored by the Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, we gave an overview of our project research and some ‘case studies’ of ways in which it might be valuable for scholars working on the Chester plays. For example, Mark Faulkner examined Lucian’s understanding of symbolic space within the city, while Catherine Clarke discussed the cross-cultural exchanges – and tensions – between Welsh and English communities in Chester, as reflected in the medieval literature.

The complete performance of the Chester Whitsun Cycle – on wagons, over three stations – was extremely exciting. A new text, incorporating Goodman’s list of ‘absurdities’, had been edited by Alexandra Johnston. Each pageant was produced by a different North American university, meaning that we had a wide range of different interpretations – from the serious to the comic, the more naturalistic to the highly stylised and liturgical.

Chester 2010 was a wonderful event, and the ‘Mapping Medieval Chester’ team are very grateful to the University of Toronto for their hospitality and interest in our work. A volume is forthcoming, to which Mark and Catherine hope to contribute.

Chester 2010: The Last Judgement

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.

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.

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.

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.

Musician Richard York demonstrated a wide variety of Medieval instruments and allowed the public to have a go.  The 1265 group from the Midlands had volunteered to help with the day and gave a fantastic demonstration of arming a knight, whilst the women demonstrated textile and braid making and there was even a Medieval leper!  Tom Hughes did some Cheshire story-telling about the dragon of Moston and St Werburgh.  There were also displays about pilgrimage, relics and the church.

The Minstrels were joined by local musicians in a Medieval ‘jamming’ session and even the local Morris dancers got wind that there was something going on and joined in as well.

The Minstrels’ Court will be re-created again in June 2010, when we will discover how many of the musicians are granted licences this time!

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.

I found Jane’s book to be a fascinating account of medieval Chester, and a wonderful introduction to the medieval city more broadly. Canonical medieval authors like Chaucer, Langland and Gower are more and more often being taught as city writers, and I would consider making the book recommended reading for my undergraduate students.

The book uses a rich range of evidence – principally local court records, but also literary texts, material artefacts and so much more – to paint a detailed picture of Chester and its citizens in the later Middle Ages. The author skilfully moves from individuals (such as ‘Alice the launderer assaulted on the river bank by a millward’s son on Whitsunday in 1306′, now immortalised in the blurb on the back cover) to groups (guilds, the aldermen, the citizens…) to the city as a whole, comparing and contrasting it to other contemporary English cities. This is achieved with inevitable analytical poise, but also with an empathy that really arrests the reader’s interest in the fate of individuals like Alice the Launderer.

I found Jane’s sections on topography and the built environment particularly interesting, because they gave me a much stronger sense of what Lucian elided in his description of the city. For example, though he spends pages and pages comparing the city to Rome (a simile that arises from St Peter’s importance in the cities), he never mentions that part of the fabric of the church of St Peter in the centre of Chester remained Roman. Nor does he mention the high-rent commercial property which abutted St Peter’s when he was writing.

I was also interested in the evidence Jane amassed for lay literacy in late medieval Chester. She points out there are six or seven parchment makers recorded in Chester in the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, perhaps based in St John’s Lane near where the scriveners’ were working, and collects some interesting evidence about the prices they charged. Cestrians also owned book: a city butcher owned a copy of Sydrak in 1439, while a matress maker owned (and was illegally deprived of) a grammar book in 1487.

Life in a Late Medieval City is a fascinating book, which can be recommended to all who are interested in medieval Chester.