You can read more details of the events (and information about booking, where appropriate) here. There will be further activities in January, including a Photography Competition for local photographers to have a go at capturing the light installation – watch this space!

'Hryre' photo by David Heke

More photos…

You can read a press release about the event here and you can see a flyer advertising the event here.

Peace I bid king and knight

Men and women and each wight!

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