Mapping the Multiple Identities of St Andrews

The small town of St Andrews on the eastern coast of Fife, is world famous as the home of golf and the location of Scotland's first university, the third oldest in the English-speaking world. Modern-day tourists also find it an attractive coastal destination for shopping and dining. The project to create an historical map of St Andrews, undertaken in partnership with the Historic Towns Trust, aims to extend fragmentary perceptions of the town by providing a tangible point of contact with its visible and invisible past. In the medieval and early modern periods St Andrews was a place of enormous significance. Its possession of the saint's bones made it a centre for medieval pilgrimage but it was transformed into a place of religious revolution in 1559 after John Knox's sermon at the town church precipitated the Scottish Reformation. Golf, sea-bathing, and the arrival of the railway in the nineteenth century established St Andrews as a centre of leisure-based tourism. This talk will focus on some of these aspects of the town's multi-layered past, and the challenges of representing them in the format of an historical map.

Margaret Connolly

Margaret is Professor of Palaeography and Codicology at the University of St Andrews. She specialises in medieval literature and is particularly interested in the scribes who wrote medieval manuscripts. She is currently part of a project to produce an historical map of St Andrews, in partnership with the Historic Towns Trust.