Once again, this project will be a team enterprise. Catherine Clarke (Swansea University), as Knowledge Transfer Fellow, will be joined by Keith Lilley (Queen’s University, Belfast) and Paul Vetch (King’s College, London). The other major project partner is the Grosvenor Museum, Chester, led by Sue Hughes, and other partners include Cheshire West and Chester Council, Visit Chester and Wrexham Museum. These organisations will share their experience of communicating with the public to help us devise new ways of disseminating our project research. ‘Discover Medieval Chester’ will soon have its own website – please check back for updates.

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:

Introduction

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

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

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…