Catherine A.M. Clarke

Place, identity and performance: spatial practices and social proxies in medieval Swansea

The testimonies of the nine witnesses to the hanging of William Cragh in Swansea in 1290 offer a rare opportunity to investigate the social and spatial practices of figures from diverse ethnic and social backgrounds moving within the same urban environment. This paper maps the itineraries of the witnesses within the landscape of medieval Swansea and its environs, exploring how they negotiate various spaces, boundaries and thresholds within and around the town, as well as how their spatial practices and reported actions shape social identity, status and power. In particular the paper examines the ways in which certain individuals make use of ‘proxies’ to circumvent spatial constraints and regulation and to extend their sphere of action, raising implications for our understanding of medieval selfhood and agency. The paper advances new insights into the ways in which medieval identities and the medieval town were mutually constitutive, contingent and subject to continual re-making.

Witnessing history: perspectives on medieval Swansea and its cultural contexts

This collection of essays is based on the inter-disciplinary project ‘City Witness: Place and Perspective in Medieval Swansea’. This special issue brings together new research produced by the project, alongside further contributions which extend these insights and explore important historical, political and cultural contexts for the projects central themes and questions.

Literary production before and after the Conquest

The role of women in literary culture from the late tenth to the mid-twelfth century forces us to reframe the parameters within which we conventionally situate texts and authors, and to interrogate the expectations we bring to literary studies. The dynamics of writing in this period challenge us to reconsider modern assumptions about authorship and agency, presenting models of female patronage, collaboration, and a range of complex transactions and collusions which facilitate and shape literary production. The evidence of the period c.980-1140 also urges us to question the very notion of ‘Britishness’ in relation to literature: the texts generated by these women resist national categorization in modern terms, instead linking the literary, linguistic, and political cultures of the British Isles, the European continent, and Scandinavia. New scholarship is focusing attention on women’s roles within this complex historical context, and in particular on the ways in which female patrons used texts to negotiate and intervene in the rapidly changing cultural and political world on either side of the Norman Conquest.