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…)

As promised, I’m posting a brief summary of the very interesting discussion which ensued from reading the excerpts from Lucian’s De Laude Cestrie I posted a couple of weeks ago. (more…)

First, let me apologise for the recent silence on the blog. The project team has been working hard to get ready to submit its first data to CCH, enabling them to produce the first visualisations of the website. These are exciting times and we may soon be able to put some of these visualisations online for public comment.

I just wanted to post this, which gives an introduction to Lucian’s In Praise of Chester and some representative samples from his work. I’ll be discussing these with Swansea University’s Centre for Medieval and Early Modern Research on Tuesday, January 20. Online comments are also encouraged. I’ll post an account of the fruits of the discussion in due course!

The three members of the project team who are charged with editing the literary descriptions of medieval Chester descended on London on Wednesday to discuss how our website will eventually look.

One thing that really excited me is that the website will be able to replicate some aspects of a medieval reader’s encounter with manuscript books far more closely than a printed edition can. (more…)

Over the next few weeks, different members of the project team will be contributing their impressions of the team’s research trip to Chester in early September, and how this helped us to start thinking about ‘Mapping Medieval Chester’.

My contribution to the project is editing and translating portions of a late-twelfth-century prose text De laude Cestriae (‘In Praise of Chester’), which the only surviving manuscript attributes to a certain Lucian, who from internal evidence may have been a monk of St Werburgh’s. For me, then, the hours I spent exploring St Werburgh’s during our research trip were a chance to get to know where my author may have lived, written and performed the Opus Dei.

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