Mapping Medieval Chester

We’ve recently received the excellent news that the Arts and Humanities Research Council will be funding our new Knowledge Transfer project, ‘Discover Medieval Chester: place, heritage and identity’. This will build on the ‘Mapping Medieval Chester’ research and develop innovative and creative ways of sharing our work with new audiences. Our planned outputs will include a new set of digital resources, including an interactive map with multi-media materials and resources for visitors to the city, a major exhibition in Chester (which will tour to Wrexham) and a permanent public art installation in Chester city centre.

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Our ‘Mapping Medieval Chester’ project has expanded to include a volume of essays relating to the city. You can see details of the book here, or search on any major online bookstore. It’s due to be published on May 31, 2011. Here’s the publisher’s blurb:

This ground-breaking volume 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 individual essays included within the volume are:

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At the end of May, three members of the Mapping Medieval Chester project team attended a conference at the University of Toronto, Canada. This wonderful event combined an academic symposium with a performance experiment – this aimed to reconstruct the Chester Whitsun Plays as seen in 1572 by the Protestant preacher Christopher Goodman, who warned that their Catholic content presented ‘peril and danger to her majesty’ Queen Elizabeth I. In a special ‘Mapping Medieval Chester’ session, Catherine, Paul and Mark shared some of our project research on place and identity in late-medieval and early modern Chester. We also came away brimming with new ideas and questions. It was also very exciting to see how many people were already using the ‘Mapping Medieval Chester’ online resources and discussing our work.

Chester 2010: The Creation and Fall of Man

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We’ve received some enquiries via our Mailing List about the future of this project and ways in which people can get involved. We’re really grateful for your continued interest and hope to keep in touch via the Blog about news, developments and future activities.

We’re currently working with the Grosvenor Museum Chester, and other partners in Chester itself, to look at ways in which we could share our project research with the local community and visitors to the city. We’re hoping to apply for funding to make this possible and have several meetings coming up to discuss ideas. Watch this space for news as our plans take shape!

On a separate note, we’ve just found out that the ‘Mapping Medieval Chester’ project will be featuring in an Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) report for government and other stakeholders entitled ‘Changing the World: the impact of the arts and humanities’. We’re really pleased to be included in a report which shows the value that this kind of research can have both within and beyond academia. Who knows – perhaps Peter Mandelson will soon be reading about Lucian and Henry Bradshaw over his morning cup of coffee…