The role of women in the shaping of civic identity in Edwardian Leicester: Edith Gittins and the Anglo-Saxon past of Aethelflaed's fountain. Historical reconstruction and 3D visualization

Abstract

This article analyses a case of female patronage in Edwardian Leicester, a drinking fountain surmounted by a statuette dedicated to a female Anglo-Saxon ruler. The bequest, by Edith Gittins (1845-1910), is contextualized within the nineteenth-century perspectives on the past that identified the roots of the English people in the Anglo-Saxon period. The article explores the cultural, social and gender implications of Gittins' intentions behind the bequest both for women's rights and for the use of the past in the construction of civic identity. These have not hitherto received sufficient attention. In order to address these questions the article exploits the potential of a 3D visualization of the urban setting where the fountain was intended to be erected to help frame the historical inquiry.