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USIHS Lecture: Dr Immo Warntjes
USIHS Lecture 6 December at QUB:
Dr Immo Warntjes will speak on ‘The Origin of Medieval Time Reckoning in Seventh-century Ireland’.
He is Ussher Assistant Professor in Early Medieval Irish History at Trinity College Dublin.
This lecture is co-hosted by the USIHS and the Royal Statistical Society NI Group.
Abstract
The book of Kells at Trinity College Dublin, composed around AD 800, attracts almost one million visitors a year. It has become a symbol of Irish identity, a reminder of its glorious past as an island of saints and scholars. Its artwork provides some insight into the thought-world of the time. Its text, the four Gospels, however, does not. In order to get a glimpse of the early medieval Irish intellectual endeavour, one has to systematically mine the manuscript libraries of Europe. This lecture will reconstruct the monastic scientific mind of pre-Viking Ireland on the basis of the most spectacular discoveries of the past four decades.
An audio track of Prof Bartlett’s lecture is available below:
USIHS Programme – Autumn 2018
USIHS Lectures are free public events, open to all with an interest in Irish History.
The Beckett Lecture – Prof. Ian McBride, ‘The Penal Times: The Catholic Church in Eighteenth-Century Ireland’
The 2018 J.C. Beckett Memorial Lecture will be given by Professor Ian McBride, Foster Professor of Irish History at the University of Oxford, on Thursday 24 May 2018, in the Seminar Room, PRONI, at 7pm
Preceded by a Wine Reception at 6.15pm in the foyer of PRONI
This is a public lecture, open to all.
The persecution suffered by Irish Catholics during the ‘Penal Times’ ranks alongside the Great Famine and the Easter Rising as one of the central components of the Irish national story. Following the final defeat of the Catholic nobility and gentry by William III’s forces in 1689-91, the Protestant ruling class embarked upon a great experiment: to legislate the religion of an entire people out of existence.
Remarkably, however, there is no systematic study of how the eighteenth-century penal code was implemented, or how it reshaped Catholic Ireland. The most obvious explanation for this silence is that the maintenance of a underground church in defiance of the state did not facilitate the keeping of regular records. To find solutions to this problem, historians must travel to Rome, where they will discover exceptionally rich archives never properly exploited by Irish scholars. Thousands of letters from Ireland survive in the Vatican, in Propaganda Fide, and the Irish colleges. They enable us to understand how the Irish priesthood survived, and they offer rare glimpses of the religious experiences of ordinary people. More surprisingly, they reveal how the Roman authorities and their allies in the continental colleges sought to reform a national church that they sometimes regarded with hostility and despair.
Audio Track
Timothy McMahon: ‘Beyond the Boundary Commission: Partitioned Identities in Modern Ireland’
A free USIHS Lecture: Thursday 19 April 2018 at 7.00pm
Public Record Office of Northern Ireland, Seminar Room
Listen again to Tim McMahon:
Prof Tim McMahon is associate professor of history at Marquette University, Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He is a social historian whose research looks at national identity, imperialism, and popular culture in modern Ireland and Britain. He is the author of Grand Opportunity: The Gaelic Revival and Irish Society, 1893-1910 (Syracuse, 2008) and editor of the memoir Pádraig Ó Fathaigh’s War of Independence: Recollections of a Galway Gaelic Leaguer (Cork, 2000), and he has published articles and book reviews in a variety of scholarly journals. He has recently co-edited a collection of essays entitled Ireland in an Imperial World (London, 2017) and writing a monograph tentatively entitled Éire Imperator: Ireland’s Imperial Ambivalence that interrogates the efforts of Irish men and women to build and manage the British Empire while others worked to undermine it.
This talk is based on new research relating to the Irish border. It draws upon testimonies and submissions to the 1920s Boundary Commission to test out some of Rogers Brubaker’s theoretical approaches to identity formation, most especially from his book Ethnicity without Groups.
This is a public event, open to all.
