Dr Clodagh Tait: ‘Margaret Isabella and the fairy in the churn: Women’s folklore and girls’ histories’

Thursday 9 May at 6pm. Public Record Office of Northern Ireland, 2 Titanic Boulevard Titanic Quarter Belfast BT3 9HQ (and online via Zoom)

The Ulster Society for Irish Studies (USIHS) and the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland (PRONI) would like to welcome you to the annual 2024 Beckett lecture, in memory of the late Professor J. C. Beckett. This year’s talk will be by Dr Clodagh Tait of Mary Immaculate College, Limerick. The lecture is free and open to the public.

The last decades have seen a flourishing of studies of Irish women’s history and writing, providing new insights into women’s roles in politics, communities and domestic life, and greater understanding of how they grappled with the strictures placed on their freedoms. However, some women are inevitably less visible than others in the surviving sources. The Irish folklore collections (compiled from the 1930s), publications on folklore and folklife, and a variety of other sources, can help to fill some of the gaps in our knowledge about women’s experiences, customs and worldviews. In this paper I will discuss women’s folklore, considering in particular stories told by girls and women about the ways of the ‘good people’, or about childhood experiences interpreted as being encounters with fairies. Worn smooth and warm with retelling (though there are hints at sharp edges too), these stories assist us in reconstructing supernatural beliefs and the actions they prompted. And they also reveal something about how narratives about fairies were shaped by community input, how personal pasts were recollected, and how girls’ histories were handed down.

Clodagh Tait lectures in Mary Immaculate College, Limerick. She has written extensively on early modern Irish social and cultural history, including the history of women and men; pregnancy, childbirth and child-rearing; death, violence, martyrdom and protest; religious devotion; and the history of emotion. Her recent articles include studies of a Cork ghost story from 1688-9, of accounts of ‘crisis apparitions’ in Ireland and the USA, and of the magical and supernatural labours of women in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She is working on an anthology of women’s folklore and a book on cursing and blessing in Ireland over 400 years. She is joint editor of Irish Historical Studies.

Please register at: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/margaret-isabella-and-the-fairy-in-the-churn-tickets-880652063027