Visualizing the Saints of Wales

The aim of this project is to build a new digital interface that will help transform public engagement with research into the saints of Wales. The veneration of saints was a central aspect of everyday belief and society in Wales over the course of a millennium. After the Reformation the traditions became contested territory, until they were reclaimed for the mainstream by scholars and the church in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Partly as a result of the high visibility of saints in the names of towns and villages around the country, these medieval figures from a semi-legendary 'Age of the Saints' play a more central part in the local heritage of Wales than in most regions of England. Nonetheless, the public is not well served by existing resources for rich, accurate and up-to-date information on the topic.

Two AHRC-funded projects since 2013 have been devoted to preparing new editions of medieval texts on saints in Wales. The first concentrated on Welsh-language literature, comprising in particular prose 'Lives' (literary accounts of their deeds and miracles) and poetry composed in their praise. The second involved the Latin Lives of Welsh saints. This literature is now appearing in a scholarly digital edition at www.welshsaints.ac.uk.

'Visualizing the Saints of Wales' is an online resource which will use two further collections of material to give broader reach and appeal to the research on the literary texts, and to add further perspectives to that work. Both strands offer the potential for visually arresting presentation. First is an extensive collection of imagery depicting the saints found around Wales, from medieval wall-paintings to modern stained glass. Second is a tool for creating digital maps to illustrate the localities associated with the saints: this will be powered by a database which records the links between each saint and places around Wales, links that take the form of place-names, church-dedications, holy wells, events described in the texts, and the sites of the images. Users will be able to search and browse the imagery and to explore the landscape of saints across the country. At all stages of their journey they will have the opportunity to move between and learn about different aspects of the resource, addressing questions such as: which saints were venerated here? how are they depicted in imagery over the centuries? how are they and their landscapes described in texts? which other saints are they associated with? And at each step they can access the medieval texts which were the focus of our research.

A key part of our impact strategy is to integrate our data with the national collections of our partners, the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Wales. These online collections are visited by more than half a million users every year, and we believe that reciprocal links between our resources will both enhance the Commission's material and offer game-changing reach to our work. Existing links with other organisations, such as Visit Wales and the Church in Wales, will also be developed in an attempt to bring the new resource to as wide an interested public as possible.