Institute of Medieval and Early Modern Studies (IMEMS)
Medieval Welsh seals in the National Library of Wales
This project is led by Phillipp Schofield (History Aber: prs@aber.ac.uk), with advice from Sue Johns (History Bangor: s.m.johns@bangor.ac.uk), and employing an IMEMS research fellow, Elizabeth New (History, Aber: ean@aber.ac.uk). Its long term aim is to develop a bid for funding for a large project which would calendar and digitise the medieval Welsh seals in the NLW, to provide a critical analysis of them, and use them to help answer current questions in medieval Welsh history, art and culture. Over the academic year 2007-8, Dr New will be auditing the available research material in the library, gathering and describing seals and documents, cataloguing specific identified NLW collections, and adding unpublished catalogue entries to the National Archive database. Please contact members of the project team with questions or suggestions.
Funding News
The project team is delighted to announce the success of a major project bid to the AHRC to support work on medieval Welsh seals at NLW and other repositories. Work on the three-year project will begin in September 2009. Dr Elizabeth New, presently at Aberystwyth, will serve as the named senior researcher on the project, and the project team will also, in the coming months, appoint a second researcher to the three-year project.
The AHRC-funded 'Seals in Medieval Wales 1200-1550 (SiMeW)' project will use seals from across Wales and the Marches to explore aspects of medieval society, politics, religion and expressions of identity in new ways, while also creating an on-line resource for further study. While the focus is Wales and its border, SiMeW’s scale will enable this project to inform all future studies of the use of seals in the UK and beyond in terms of methodology and the interpretative content of the outputs.
Further details on the project will be posted on this page in due course.
Please also see: http://www.aber.ac.uk/aberonline/en/archive/2009/03/au5309/