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).

We discussed the audience of Lucian’s work, coming to the conclusion that the Easter tables and brief computistical instructions at the beginning of the manuscript suggest it was written for a local priest, conceivably a canon of St John’s. Several delegates observed the importance of understanding Lucian’s place within the ‘Encomium urbis’ (Praise of Cities) tradition, commenting both on the similarities of the De Laude with Fitzstephen’s poem in praise of London and the idiosyncracy of Lucian’s choice to write in prose.

We explored the complex rhetoric of the ‘excusatio operis’ (account of his reasons for writing) with which Lucian begins his work (detailing a particular meeting with his patron, and praising him as a worthy model of virtue), finding Lucian’s handling of traditional tropes to be extremely sophisticated. We pondered how far Lucian’s text can be regarded as a proto-guidebook, noting that he at one point envisions his reader studying the text with one eye and the streets it describes with the other.

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!

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. Medieval authors frequently cite the bible and secular texts from classical antiquity. They rarely give any precise details about what they are citing – a reference to Job 11:21 would be described as ‘In Iob’, while a reference to Augustine’s City of God  could simply be attributed to ‘Augustinus’ (and sometimes to someone else entirely). But medieval authors would have expected their readers to know the source; largely because they took it for granted that their readers had undergone the same education in the classics they had, and would be daily involved in the study of the bible, the lectio divina.

Few modern readers have the same intense familiarity with these texts, knowledge which medieval authors took for granted. Printed editions have to rely on the rather heavy-handed method of revealling the identity of an author’s sources in an apparatus fontium at the bottom of each and every page. However, readers of the e-edition of Lucian’s De Laude Cestrie will be able to hover the cursor over the italicised text of a quotation to reveal a box which divulges the source of that quotation. I think this imitates rather nicely the way a medieval reader would have scanned his mind to recall where he had heard those words before.

This is just one small way in which electronic editions can harness the possibilities of xml coding to present texts in new and innovative ways which replicate medieval modes of reading.

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.

Little of Lucian’s monastery survives in the fabric of the present cathedral. There’s the base of a column from the twelfth-century choir, a round arch in the North transept, the chapter house vestibule, a few stray grave slabs now in the cloister. On the surface, this was a meagre survival rate. Yet in the progressive layers of restoration, in the continuing devotion to the cathedral’s founders and patrons, and in the ongoing fascination with the region’s Christian history, there are whispering echoes of what Lucian’s experience of the monastery of St Werburgh must have been like.

Take A. K. Nicholson’s stained glass portrait of St Anselm which is in the North transept; take the altar of St Oswald, King and Martyr, where prayer is now offered for the City and County of Chester; take the numerous Anglo-Saxon and Christian saints whose likenesses adorn the windows in the cloister; Anselm, Oswald, Bede, Aldhelm, Augustine – they would have been the heroes in Lucian’s perception of his lineage as a Benedictine monk in Chester.

To quote Lucian’s own words: ‘After the venerable Earl Hugo summoned him, the life-giving Archbishop Anselm arrived and religion flourished and grew strong according to ancient customs’. Chester’s cathedral, like Lucian before it, does a fine job of remembering its debt to these men and to ancient customs.