Mapping the Medieval City: Space, Place and Identity in Chester c.1200–1600 ed. by Catherine A. M. Clarke (review)

In this recent collection of essays on issues of space, place, and identity in and around Chester during the late Medieval and Early Modern period, editor Catherine A. M. Clarke has assembled a broad range of essays from multiple disciplines dealing with not only a four hundred year period in the history of a particular English city, but with a set of issues—mapping and boundaries, narrative identity, liminal cultural spaces, and the nature of place – that resonate far outward. Despite the eclectic collection, the volume presents a set of coherent approaches to the city of Chester, clustering around several central texts and environments: Lucian’s Liber Luciani De Laude Cestrie, Henry Bradshaw’s Life of St. Werburge, the churches of St. John and St. Werburgh, and the space—both lived and represented—of Chester itself.

The introductory essay, written by the editor, follows de Certeau in describing the illusory experience of “transcending the subjectivities and narrowly focalized perspectives of those down in the urban environment itself” when viewing Chester from its famous walls, an experience described by commentators from Lucian to Henry James. In contrast to a schematizing and reductive attempt to see the city from above, the essays in the volume are offered up as a series of walks moving through “spaces which are already encoded with meaning.”

The second and third chapter deal with mapping and boundaries in Chester. The former, contributed by Keith D. Lilley, examines the difficulties and uncertainties involved in creating a map of Medieval Chester. Lilley describes both the process of making a map that is spatially faithful using modern software as well as revealing the necessarily subjective nature of such undertakings. The difficulties of locating particular symbolic landmarks – such as the multiple crosses of Chester – become metonymic for the problems of mapping as a discipline. Particularly interesting in this chapter is Lilley’s account of the power of software to create multiple, overlaid maps that incorporate subjectivity and uncertainty as features rather than trying to exorcise them.

In the next chapter, C. P. Lewis provides an extensive treatment of the status of the city’s internal boundaries, including the precincts of its religious houses and a liminal public space surrounding “the Row walkway,” which followed a complex route through the city. The liberties of Chester and its external boundaries are also traced back to the Domesday book of 1086, providing a solid historical treatment of Chester’s internal stability. The chapter’s main conclusion—that the internal and external boundaries of Chester were relatively stable over much of its history—provides a useful starting point for future treatments of space in the city and an interesting contrast to the considerations of the previous chapter.

Chapters 4 and 5 both deal with Lucian’s famous encomium, Liber Luciani De Laude Cestrie, situating it rhetorically and politically. John Doran places Lucian’s text in the context of the political situation in Chester in the late twelfth and early thirteenth century, arguing that instead of promoting a particular segment of clerical life or privileging any of Chester’s churches, the particular stance the book takes is an effort to “ensure cooperation between the monks and clerks of the city” in order to protect Chester and its churches from outside influence. Mark Faulkner’s subsequent chapter, “The Spatial Hermeneutics of Lucian’s De Laude Cestrie,” continues work with Lucian’s praise of Chester, focusing on contradiction between Lucian’s attempt to schematize the city using neoplatonic and classical modes of understanding, and his attempt to attend to the contingent, specific nature of experience in the city. The monk’s walks in Chester ultimately present us with “a testament to the capacity of space to be unpredictable” and resistant to schematic reduction. Similarly, the marginal notes in De Laude Cestrie indicate that the composition process was “piecemeal” and complicated in structure, performed during travel and...