Mapping 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. 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 about urban landscapes in the Middle Ages were interpreted and navigated by local inhabitants.

One particularly innovative dimension of this is the project's use of information technologies both as a means of exploring these "mappings" of medieval Chester, for example through the use and development of a Geographical Information System (GIS) to create a map of Chester as it was c.1500, and as a means of widening access and public interest in Chester's medieval past and in medieval urban studies generally by linking literary and cartographic sources in digital media.

GIS shape files and the TEI-XML encoding textual editions can all be downloaded in raw form from the website allowing individuals to carry out their own further analyses and research.