Mapping the Medieval City

Space, Place and Identity in Chester C.1200-1600

Author(s) Catherine Clarke

Language: English

Genre(s): History

Series: Religion and Culture in the Middle Ages

  • May 2011 · 304 pages ·216x138mm

  • · Hardback - 9780708323922
  • · eBook - pdf - 9780708323939
  • · Paperback - 9780708326527
  • · eBook - epub - 9781783164615

About The Book

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.

Endorsements

"Catherine Clarke's marvellous edited anthology, Mapping the Medieval City, offers a fascinating account of what maps, chronicles, literary texts, and other sources tell us about the multiple and shifting meanings of Chester from c1200-1500. The volume's twelve learned and lucid essays are a must read for anyone interested in not only the particular case of medieval Chester but also, more generally, the history of the city." Kathy Lavezzo, Associate Professor of English, University of Iowa "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 book 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." --John Hines, Cardiff University

Contents

ntroduction: Medieval Chester: Views from the Walls Catherine A.M. Clarke 1. Urban mappings: Visualizing Late Medieval Chester in Cartographic and Textual Form Keith D. Lilley 2. Framing Medieval Chester: the Landscape of Urban Boundaries C.P. Lewis 3. St Werburgh's, St John's and the Liber Luciani De Laude Cestrie John Doran 4. The Spatial Hermeneutics of Lucian's De Laude Cestrie Mark Faulkner 5. '3e beoo pe ancren of Englond ... a pah 3e weren an cuuent of ... Chester': Liminal Spaces and the Anchoritic life in Medieval Chester Liz Herbert McAvoy 6. Sanctity and the City: Sacred Space in Henry Bradshaw's Life of St Werburge Laura Varnam 7. Plotting Chester on the National Map: Richard Pynson's 1521 printing of Henry Bradshaw's Life of Saint Werburge Cynthia Turner Camp 8. The Outside Within: Medieval Chester and North Wales as a Social Space Helen Fulton 9. Mapping the Migrants: Welsh, Manx and Irish Settlers in fifteenth-century Chester Jane Laughton 10. Leeks for Livery: Consuming Welsh Difference in the Chester Shepherds' Play Robert W. Barrett, Jnr 11. Remembering Anglo-Saxon Mercia in late-medieval and early-modern Chester Catherine A.M. Clarke

About the Author(s)

Author(s): Catherine Clarke

Catherine A.M. Clarke is Professor in the English Department at the University of Southampton, having previously taught at Swansea University and Oxford University.

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