Mapping the Medieval City

Catherine Clarke

Description

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 volume includes new interpretations of well-known sources and features such as the Chester Whistun Plays and the city’s Rows and walls, but also includes discussions of less-studied material such as Lucian’s In Praise of Chester – one of the earliest examples of urban encomium from England and an important text for understanding the medieval city – and the wealth of medieval Welsh poetry relating to Chester. Certain key themes emerge across the essays within this volume, including relations between the Welsh and English, formulations of centre and periphery, nation and region, different kinds of ‘mapping’ and the visual and textual representation of place, borders and boundaries, uses of the past in the production of identity, and the connections between discourses of gender and space. The volume seeks to generate conversation and debate amongst scholars of different disciplines, working across different locations and periods, and to open up directions for future work on space, place and identity in the medieval city.

Sujets

• Medieval
• Histoire
• Inglaterra
• History
• England
• Europe

Informations

• Publié par: University of Wales Press
• Date de parution: 15 mai 2011
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781783164615
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

RELIGION AND CULTURE IN THE MIDDLE AGES
Mapping the Medieval City
Series Editors Denis Renevey (University of Lausanne) Diane Watt (Aberystwyth University)
Editorial Board Miri Rubin (Queen Mary, University of London) Jean-Claude Schmitt ( cole des Hautes tudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris) Fiona Somerset (Duke University) Christiania Whitehead (University of Warwick)
RELIGION AND CULTURE IN THE MIDDLE AGES
Mapping the Medieval City
Space, Place and Identity in Chester c .1200-1600
Edited by
CATHERINE A. M. CLARKE
The Contributors, 2011 Cover image: Plan of Chester in 1585 by William Smith The British Library Board, Harley MS 1046, item number f. 173. Cover design: Olwen Fowler
Reprinted 2013
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any material form (including photocopying or storing it in any medium by electronic means and whether or not transiently or incidentally to some other use of this publication) without the written permission of the copyright owner. Applications for the copyright owner s written permission to reproduce any part of this publication should be addressed to the University of Wales Press, 10 Columbus Walk, Brigantine Place, Cardiff, CF10 4UP.
www.uwp.co.uk
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978-0-7083-2392-2 e-ISBN 978-1-78316-461-5
The rights of the Contributors to be identified as authors of this work have been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 79 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
C ONTENTS
Series Editors Preface
Acknowledgements
Notes on Contributors
Abbreviations
Figures
1 Introduction: Medieval Chester: Views from the Walls
Catherine A. M. Clarke
2 Urban Mappings: Visualizing Late Medieval Chester in Cartographic and Textual Form
Keith D. Lilley
3 Framing Medieval Chester: the Landscape of Urban Boundaries
C. P. Lewis
4 St Werburgh s, St John s and the Liber Luciani De Laude Cestrie
John Doran
5 The Spatial Hermeneutics of Lucian s De Laude Cestrie
Mark Faulkner
6 3e beo e ancren of Englond as ah 3e weren an cuuent of Chester : Liminal Spaces and the Anchoritic life in Medieval Chester
Liz Herbert McAvoy
7 Sanctity and the City: Sacred Space in Henry Bradshaw s Life of St Werburge
Laura Varnam
8 Plotting Chester on the National Map: Richard Pynson s 1521 printing of Henry Bradshaw s Life of St Werburge
Cynthia Turner Camp
9 The Outside Within: Medieval Chester and North Wales as a Social Space
Helen Fulton
10 Mapping the Migrants: Welsh, Manx and Irish Settlers in fifteenth-century Chester
Jane Laughton
11 Leeks for Livery: Consuming Welsh Difference in the Chester Shepherds Play
Robert W. Barrett, Jnr
12 Remembering Anglo-Saxon Mercia in late medieval and early modern Chester
Catherine A. M. Clarke
Bibliography
S ERIES E DITORS P REFACE
Religion and Culture in the Middle Ages aims to explore the interface between medieval religion and culture, with as broad an understanding of those terms as possible. It puts to the forefront studies which engage with works that significantly contributed to the shaping of medieval culture. However, it also gives attention to studies dealing with works that reflect and highlight aspects of medieval culture that have been neglected in the past by scholars of the medieval disciplines. For example, devotional works and the practice they infer illuminate our understanding of the medieval subject and its culture in remarkable ways, while studies of the material space designed and inhabited by medieval subjects yield new evidence on the period and the people who shaped it and lived in it. In the larger field of religion and culture, we also want to explore further the roles played by women as authors, readers and owners of books, thereby defining them more precisely as actors in the cultural field. The series as a whole investigates the European Middle Ages, from c .500 to c .1500. Our aim is to explore medieval religion and culture with the tools belonging to such disciplines as, among others, art history, philosophy, theology, history, musicology, the history of medicine, and literature. In particular, we would like to promote interdisciplinary studies, as we believe strongly that our modern understanding of the term applies fascinatingly well to a cultural period marked by a less tight confinement and categorization of its disciplines than the modern period. However, our only criterion is academic excellence, with the belief that the use of a large diversity of critical tools and theoretical approaches enables a deeper understanding of medieval culture. We want the series to reflect this diversity, as we believe that, as a collection of outstanding contributions, it offers a more subtle representation of a period that is marked by paradoxes and contradictions and which necessarily reflects diversity and difference, however difficult it may sometimes have proved for medieval culture to accept these notions.
A CKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The essays in this volume were inspired by the Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded interdisciplinary research project Mapping Medieval Chester: Place and Identity in an English Borderland City, c. 1200-1500 . Directed by Catherine A. M. Clarke, the project also involved Keith Lilley and Helen Fulton as Co-Investigators and Mark Faulkner as Post-Doctoral Researcher, together with Paul Vetch at the Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King s College London, as Technical Director. The digital resources produced by the project can be viewed at www.medievalchester.ac.uk . The essays by Clarke, Lilley, Fulton and Faulkner in this collection were written as part of the AHRC-funded research. The Mapping Medieval Chester project also included a major international conference at Swansea University, Mapping the Medieval City (July 2009). Many of the other essays in this volume were presented as papers at this event, and indeed almost all of the volume contributors were present at the conference, which proved a valuable opportunity to share work in progress and exchange ideas. The volume editor and project team would like to thank the AHRC for the funding which enabled the Mapping Medieval Chester research project, which has expanded to include the collection of essays published here. Thanks also to Gill Alexander of Queen s University, Belfast, for drawing the maps of medieval Chester ( Figures 1 and 2 ) based on the digital atlas produced by the Mapping Medieval Chester project. The editors of the University of Wales Press series Religion and Culture in the Middle Ages have provided insightful and valuable comments on the various drafts of this volume and, finally, the volume editor would like to thank everyone at the University of Wales Press for their expert and cheerful help, especially the commissioning editors Ennis Akpinar and Sarah Lewis, and the press s editor Dafydd Jones.
N OTES ON C ONTRIBUTORS
R OBERT W. B ARRETT , Jnr, is Associate Professor of English and Medieval Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His research crosses the period boundary between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, focusing on calendrical festivity, early English drama and local identity. In addition to articles on Chester pageants and London Lord Mayor s Shows, his publications include the monograph Against All England: Regional Identity and Cheshire Writing, 1195-1656 (Notre Dame, 2009). He is currently editing the Chester Whitsun plays for the TEAMS Middle English Texts Series and planning a second monograph on Pentecost in early English literature.
C YNTHIA T URNER C AMP is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Georgia, where her research focuses on English hagiography, especially fifteenth-century Middle English literature and late medieval monasticism. She is currently preparing a monograph on the Middle English and early Tudor lives of Anglo-Saxon saints and an edition of Henry Bradshaw s Life of St Werburge and Life of St Radegund .
C ATHERINE A. M. C LARKE is Senior Lecturer in English and Associate Director of the Centre for Medieval and Early Modern Research at Swansea University. Her research centres on earlier medieval literature and culture, with particular attention to questions of place, power and identity and an emphasis on interdisciplinary approaches. Her publications include the monograph Literary Landscapes and the Idea of England, 700-1400 (Cambridge, 2006), and she was Principal Investigator on the AHRC-funded Mapping Medieval Chester project.
J OHN D ORAN was Deputy Head of History and Archaeology and Senior Lecturer in Medieval History at the University of Chester. His research focused on the relationship between the popes and the city of Rome from the eleventh to the thirteenth centuries, but he was also interested in the development of Chester and its similar ecclesiastical and civic tensions. His publications include an edited volume, Pope Celestine III: Diplomat and Pastor (Ashgate: Farnham, 2009). John died in October 2012, shortly before the publication of this volume in paperback.
M ARK F AULKNER is currently Lecturer in English at University College Cork. His research focuses on medieval literary culture, particularly the composition and reception of English, Latin and French texts in England during the long twelfth century. His publications include lfric, St Edmund and St Edwold of Cerne , Medium Aevum , 77 (2008) and he is currently writing a monograph entitled Ignota lingua: English literatures 1042-1215 , as well as editing Lucian s De Laude Cestrie . He was research assistant on the Mapping Medieval Chester project.
H ELEN F ULTON is Professor of Medieval Literature at the University of York and was previously Professor of English and Director of the Research Institute for Arts and Humanities at Swansea University. Most of her research is concerned with the i