29 August 2009, Chester

The AHRC-funded project ‘Mapping Medieval Chester’ project will culminate with the ‘Mapping Medieval Chester Festival’ in Chester on August 29 (Bank Holiday weekend), organized in partnership with the Grosvenor Museum, Chester. With events across the city, the Festival will involve local people and visitors in a range of activities which explore and celebrate the project research.

‘Mapping Medieval Chester’ is a collaborative project between Swansea University, Queen’s University Belfast and King’s College London which has brought together a team including literary specialists, historical geographers and historians to explore space, place and identity in medieval Chester. The project asks questions about Chester as a city on the (often troubled) border between England and Wales, and about how different medieval inhabitants imagined and represented the urban space around them. In particular, the project has explored the multicultural nature of medieval Chester: a city in which different ethnic and cultural communities interacted and configured the space around them in different ways.

The ‘Mapping Medieval Chester Festival’ will launch the digital resources produced by the project, now available at www.medievalchester.ac.uk. These include new editions and translations of texts relating to medieval Chester in Latin, English and Welsh, interlinked with an interactive digital atlas of the city c.1500.

The Festival will include a wide variety of interesting and fun activities designed to bring the medieval city to life. Participants can come to a calligraphy workshop and learn to write Gothic script, meet medieval pilgrims at St John’s Church, take a medieval-focused tour of the cathedral, explore the medieval Water Tower, or join a literary tour of the city with project researchers and hear perspectives on the city from its medieval English and Welsh residents. There are many more activities too (some require booking in advance).

For further information, please see www.medievalchester.ac.uk or contact the Project Director, Dr Catherine Clarke (c.a.clarke@swansea.ac.uk).