'Mapping the Medieval City: Space, Place and Identity', at Swansea University

From Hortulus

30-31 July 2009. 'Mapping the Medieval City: Space, Place and Identity', an interdisciplinary colloquium at Swansea University.

This colloquium, held to mark the completion of the AHRC-funded research project‘Mapping Medieval Chester’, will launch the digital materials produced by the project and provide a forum for wider discussion of place and identity in the medieval city,as well as concepts of ‘mapping’in the Middle Ages and today. The colloquium will feature papers on medieval Chester,but we are also seeking inter-disciplinary contributions relating to the medieval city more generally. The‘Mapping Medieval Chester’project has brought together scholars working in the disciplines of literary studies, geography, archaeology and history to explore how material and imagined urban landscapes construct and convey a sense of place-identity. The focus of the research project itself is the city of Chester and the identities that its inhabitants formed between c.1200 and 1500. A key aspect of the project is to integrate geographical and literary mappings of the medieval city using cartographic and textual sources and using these to understand more how urban landscapes in the Middle Ages were interpreted and navigated by local inhabitants. We hope the colloquium will use our research on Chester as the basis for broader discussions centering on the project’s themes, methods and theoretical preoccupations.

Call for papers: Deadline: 23 February 2009. We therefore invite 20-minute paper proposals (abstracts of around 300 words) on any subject relating to the project’s broad themes of place and identity in the medieval European city. Further information: m.j.faulkner@swan.ac.uk; http://www.medievalchester.ac.uk