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…)
I’m just back from the 44th International Congress on Medieval Studies, held at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo. The Congress featured two sessions on Mapping the Medieval City sponsored by the Centre for Medieval and Early Modern Research (MEMO) at Swansea University. (more…)
I’m excited to say the draft programme for July’s Mapping the Medieval City colloquium is now available. We’re very excited about the number and range of contributions: it really will be an international, interdisciplinary event!
The draft programme is available here - do take a look!
If you are interested in attending, you can download a cover letter and the registration form.
We’d be delighted for you to join us!
It’s amazing how frequently one text casts unexpected light on another text. Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, for example, shows Lucian’s marginalia is not as eccentric as we might think. (more…)
The latest issue of The Past Uncovered, the newsletter of Chester City Council’s Archaeology, Design and Conservation services, includes a front-page feature on our ‘Mapping Medieval Chester’ project. There’s also a handy introduction to Lucian and Bradshaw – two of the texts we’re working on – on page 2 as well. You can read the newsletter here as a PDF: the-past-uncovered-oct-2008.
The Grosvenor Museum has asked us to publicise their Medieval Christmas, to be held in the Chapter House at Chester Cathedral on Sunday, December 6 between 10:30am and 4:30pm.
They promise ‘you will have the opportunity to discover how Christmas was celebrated many years ago. There will be Medieval food, herbs and spices, Medieval Christmas carols played on period instruments and you can join in the dancing and mumming plays. The pardoner will show you some of his relics and pilgrim signs, or you can even make your own beeswax candle with the chandler.’ Let’s hope this pardoner is a bit more honest than Chaucer’s!
Full details are available here.
An important dimension of the Mapping Medieval Chester project is our partnership with the Grosvenor Museum, Chester. Sue Hughes, the Museum and Education Manager, is one of the members of our project 
Advisory Committee, and we’re benefiting from the museum’s enormous store of resources and expertise relating to Chester local history. We’re hoping that our project will help to develop and extend our understanding of the medieval city and the ways in which its different cultural communities imagined and represented the urban landscape around them. We’ll be working together with the Grosvenor Museum to run our public workshop in Chester in summer 2009, and are already planning lots of exciting activities (for confirmation of the date and full details, please join our mailing list and/or keep an eye on this blog!).
In the meantime, if you’re local to Chester or visiting the area, please take a look at the ‘Mapping Medieval Chester’ display, put together by Sue Hughes and her team, in the Grosvenor Museum. We hope this will give you a small taster of the project and the historical period we’re exploring.
My role in the project is to edit Welsh poems which refer to Chester or have Chester connections. In the middle ages, Chester was the administrative centre for the north Welsh towns, most of which were originally English foundations. There is very little visibility of the Welsh history of Chester in the Grosvenor Museum, for example, so I am hoping to make the Welsh aspects of Chester’s medieval history more accessible.
The project team will contribute to this blog over the coming months, sharing our progress and discussing questions which arise from our research. We hope that this blog will allow us to explore and reflect upon some of the methodological and theoretical challenges which our work on medieval mappings presents. We’ll also give accounts of the more practical, hands-on aspects of our research – like the physical feat of setting up a GPS base station at the top of St Werburgh’s tower!
We look forward to receiving responses to our posts, and are grateful for any comments and suggestions.