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The University of Southampton
Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Culture

English Professor awarded £285,000 by the AHRC for new medieval project

Published: 29 August 2012

Professor Catherine Clarke (English) has been awarded £285,000 from the AHRC for a new project, ‘City Witness: Place and Perspective in Medieval Swansea’.

The project will produce a full digital edition of the eleven witness testimonies describing the hanging of the Welshman William ‘Cragh' by the lord of Gower in Swansea in the late thirteenth century. These statements will then be linked with an interactive digital atlas of Swansea c.1300, together with 3D visualisations which aim to reconstruct the witnesses' sight-lines through the medieval town. Analysis of these materials will extend our understanding of the medieval town and enable us to examine the different perspectives (literal and metaphorical) of different individuals and groups within the urban environment: Anglo-Norman and Welsh, lay and religious, male and female, lord, burgess and outlaw.

Swansea's medieval heritage is currently an untapped cultural and economic asset. This project will help to drive regeneration initiatives in the city, including the development of a ‘Castle Quarter' and the production of a series of pavement markers marking locations and features in the medieval town. Partnerships with Swansea Council and the Glamorgan Gwent Archaeological Trust will inform the project research and help the team to reach wide audiences.

The project also involves teams in the Department of Geography, Archaeology and Palaeoecology, Queen's University Belfast, and the Department of Digital Humanities, King's College, London. It begins on 1 January 2013.

For more information on Prof Clarke's research, please visit her homepage on the link to the right of this page.

To see some of the project team's previous work on place and identity in the medieval city, please visit www.medievalchester.ac.uk or http://discover.medievalchester.ac.uk

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