Mapping the medieval city : space, place and identity in Chester c.1200-1600 / edited by Catherine A. M. Clarke.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Clarke, Catherine A. M.

Series:

Religion & culture in the Middle Ages

Religion and culture in the middle ages

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Chester (England)--History.

Chester (England).

Chester (England)--Civilization.

Chester (England)--Social life and customs.

Physical Description:

12 unnumbered pages, 244 pages : illustrations, maps ; 22 cm.

Place of Publication:

Cardiff : University of Wales Press, 2011.

Summary:

Few material phenomena are as complex as the city. In its border location, the changing form of Chester dramatically reflects the vicissitudes of military, political and economic fortune, and social difference and conflict within. This hook is a model of multidisciplinary coherency, with a diverse collection of intelligent and thoughtful papers that not only reveal how medieval men and women in Chester made sense of their habitat for themselves, but at the same time map the solid, autonomous reality of the place.

This volume brings together contributions from scholars across a range of disciplines 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 multilingual culture and surviving material fabric - it seeks to recover the experience and understanding of the urban space by individuals and groups within the medieval city, and offers 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. Book jacket.

Contents:

1 Introduction: Medieval Chester: Views from the Walls 1 Catherine A. M. Clarke

2 Urban Mappings: Visualizing Late Medieval Chester in Cartographic and Textual Form 19 Keith D. Lilley

3 Framing Medieval Chester: the Landscape of Urban Boundaries 42 C. P. Lewis

4 St Werburgh's, St John's and the Liber Luciani De Laude Cestrie 57 John Doran

5 The Spatial Hermeneutics of Lucian's De Laude Cestrie 78 Mark Faulkner

6 '3e beoð be ancren of Englond ... as pah 3e weren an cuuent of ... Chester': Liminal Spaces and the Anchoritic life in Medieval Chester 99 Liz Herbert McAvoy

7 Sanctity and the City: Sacred Space in Henry Bradshaw's Life of St Werburge 114 Laura Varnam

8 Plotting Chester on the National Map: Richard Pynson's 1521 printing of Henry Bradshaw's Life of St Werburge 131 Cynthia Turner Camp

9 The Outside Within: Medieval Chester and North Wales as a Social Space 149 Helen Fulton

10 Mapping the Migrants: Welsh, Manx and Irish Settlers in fifteenth-century Chester 169 Jane Laughton

11 Leeks for Livery: Consuming Welsh Difference in the Chester Shepherds' Play 184 Robert W. Barrett, Jnr

12 Remembering Anglo-Saxon Mercia in late medieval and early modern Chester 201 Catherine A. M. Clarke.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780708323922

0708323928

OCLC:

706031303

Online:

Contributor biographical information

Publisher description