This week (beginning 18 May) The River-side will post a series of blog posts comprising a student-created online exhibition Mapping Cork: Trade, culture and politics in medieval and early modern Ireland. This online exhibition is curated and overseen by Dr Małgorzata Krasnodębska-D’Aughton, Senior Lecturer, UCC’s School of History and Elaine Harrington, Special Collections Librarian, UCC Library. Four MA in Medieval History students: Andrew […]
Publication: The Alliance of Pirates: Ireland and Atlantic piracy in the early seventeenth century by Connie Kelleher
In the early part of the seventeenth-century, along the southwest coast of Ireland, piracy was a way of life. Following the outlawing of privately-commissioned ships in 1603 by the new king of England, disenfranchised like-minded men of the sea, many who had been former ‘privateers’, merchant sailors and seamen and who had no recourse but to turn to plunder, joined forces with traditional pirates. With the closing of the ports, they transferred their base of operations from England to Ireland and formed an alliance. Within the context of the Munster Plantation, many of the pirates came to settle, some bringing families. These men and their activities not alone influenced the socio-economic and geo-political landscape of Ireland at that time but challenged European maritime power centres, while also forging links across the North Atlantic that touched the Mediterranean, Northwest Africa and the New World.
Tracing the cultural origins of this particular period in maritime plunder from the late-1500s and throughout its heyday in the opening decades of the 1600s, The Alliance of Pirates analyses the nature and extent of this predation and looks at its impact and influence in Ireland and across the Atlantic. Operating during a period of emerging global maritime empires, when nations across Europe were vying for supremacy of the seas, the pirates built their own highly lucrative and highly potent piratical power base.
Drawing on extensive primary and secondary historical sources Dr Connie Kelleher explores who these pirates were, their main theatre of operations and the characters that aided and abetted them. Archaeological evidence uniquely supports the investigation and provides a tangible cultural link through time to the pirates, their cohorts and their bases.
For more info, see the book on the Cork University Press website. Published April 2020 | 9781782053651 | €30 £27| Hardback |234 x 156mm| 552 pages | 60 illustrations
Dr Connie Kelleher is a State underwater archaeologist with the National Monuments Service and visiting lecturer in underwater archaeology in University College Cork.
The exhibition “Readers & Reputations: The Reception and Circulation of Early Modern Women’s Writing, 1550-1700” will be held in the foyer of the Hardiman Research Building, NUI Galway. The exhibition runs from 16th January to 2nd April 2020.
This exhibition showcases the work of RECIRC and is funded by the Irish Research Council. RECIRC is a 5 year project that has produced a large-scale, quantitative analysis of the reception and circulation of women’s writing from 1550 to 1700, and is funded by the European Research Council. For more on the project, see the RECIRC website, follow the project on Twitter at @RECIRC_ or contact the project’s Principal Investigator Prof Marie-Louise Coolahan.
#writinglivesUCD
9-9.30 Registration and coffee
9.30-11 Plenary I: Prof Andrew Hadfield (Sussex), Reading The Life Between the Lines: Nashe, Spenser and Others
11-11.30 Coffee
11.30-12.30 Panel 1: The Religious Self
Richard Kirwan (UL) “Trouble Every Day: Experiences of Religious Exile in the Writings of Jacob Reihing”
John McCafferty (UCD) ‘”O Felix Columba Caeli/ O Happy Dove of Heaven”: a manuscript life shredded by early modern print’
12.30-1.30 Lunch
1.30—2.30 Panel 2: Unmooring life-writing: method, memory, and genre
Chair: Prof Kate Chedgzoy (Newcastle)
Ramona Wray (QUB), “Reading Life-Writing in the Cary/Tanfield Record”
Kate Hodgkin (U of East London), “Memory, melancholy and the languages of loss in 17th century life writing”
2.30-3 Break
3-4.15 Panel 3: – Life writing and religion
Ann-Maria Walsh (UCD) “Mary (née Boyle) Rich, Countess of Warwick (1624-1678): Writing and Experimenting – A Spiritual Life”
Mark Empey (NUIG) “Life writer and Life writing: the parallel worlds of Sir James Ware”
5pm Wine reception – Common Room, Newman Building, UCD
9.30-11 Plenary II: Prof Kate Chedgzoy (Newcastle), Writing Children’s Lives
11-11.30 Coffee
11.30-1 Panel 4 – Women in the 17th Century
Carol Baxter (independent scholar) “’Serving God rather than my father’: religious life writing as a rejection of the patriarchal family”
Naomi McAreavey (UCD) – The Countess of Ormonde’s Letters (title tbc)
Danielle Clarke (UCD) “Irish women’s recipe books as life writing: form, process, method”
1-2pm Lunch (exhibition and archive visit)
2-3pm Panel 5 – Travel and formation of the self
Maria Luis Dominguez-Guerrero (Seville) “Rhetoric of the Conquest: Narrations from Castilian Explorers”
Eva Holmberg (Helsinki) “Visual Self-Description in Seventeenth-Century British Travel Accounts”
4-6pm Walking tour of Renaissance Dublin (AM Walsh), followed by pub visit and conference dinner, at Le Pichet, Trinity Street, Dublin 2* [* Dinner is €40 per head. ]
Saturday 8th September 2018, K114, Newman Building
9.30-11 Plenary III: Prof Alan Stewart (Columbia), Writing Lives under Duress
11-11.15 Coffee
11.15-1 Panel 6 – Alternative Forms
Nelson Marques (Miami) “War and Self: Soldier’s Petitions in Seventeenth-Century Portugal”
Emma Claussen (Oxford) “Forms of living in Descartes’s Les passions de l’âme”
Raluca Duna (Bucharest) “Writing the self with images, painting identity with texts”
1-1.30pm Roundtable and close
Followed by optional lunch in Donnybrook, Dublin 4.
The conference is free to attend, but for catering purposes the organisers would appreciate it if you could sign up using this link: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/writing-lives-1500-1700-tickets-48653964317
If you have any questions, please email the organisers at writinglives@ucd.ie.
This conference is supported by the College of Arts and Humanities and the Humanities Institute, UCD.
#writinglivesUCD
Image credit: ‘The Librarian’, Giuseppe Arcimboldo, c.1566 (Skokloster Castle)
University College Dublin, 6th-8th September 2018
This conference on life writing/self writing will address questions related to life writing across Europe between 1500-1700, in particular the influence of different religious, social, cultural and national perspectives on the emergence of various forms of self-writing. We are particularly interested in relationships, connections, textual traffic and circulation across Europe through networks such as intellectual circles/coteries, religious orders, and the experience of exiled communities. Life writing has long historical roots, but such writings are arguably the first examples of demotic, vernacular writing in the period. ‘Life writing’ describes narratives that allow us to interrogate how far ideas of self were fashioned by and through various forms of written representation, and to examine the stylistic, generic and social parameters to the formation of identities. Life writings comprise new, hybrid and emerging forms over the period 1500-1700, developing from relatively ‘static’ modes such as saints lives, eulogies, encomia, into more dynamic forms like biography, autobiography, chronicle histories, prison writing, prophecy, sermons, diaries, elegies, monumental verse, and letters. The conference aims to provide a more nuanced account of the emergence, creation and reception of narratives of the self, focussing not just on content, but on narrative, generic and material frameworks that inflect the representation of the “self” according to variables such as gender, class, region, language and religion.
The key questions that we hope that contributors will address include:
1. How do we define “life writing” and what kinds of narratives, texts and artifacts might it include?
2. What are the critical differences between biographically based criticism and the investigation of self writing/narrativization of selves?
3. What are the specific conditions (historical, cultural, local, religious/confessional, familial) that enable the emergence of life writing over the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries? Why then?
4. How useful is standard periodisation for thinking about the emergence of these hybrid, complex forms from (mostly) domestic spaces?
5. How significant is it that women writers and subjects are so strongly represented in life writing, and what is at stake in these representations?
6. How might texts which are generically distinct from life writing be read through this framework, e.g. poems, romances, polemic etc?
7. What role does editing, transmission and circulation play in the construction and reception of life writing?
8. What light might comparative perspectives from other languages and cultures offer?
We welcome contributions from established and early career researchers, and encourage papers that address non-Anglophone writings, although papers will be delivered in English.
Papers (20 minutes) on the following topics are particularly welcome:
– memorialization
– exemplarity
– forms/modes/genres/language choices
– materiality/transmission
– privacy/publication
– historical contextualisation(s)
– authorship/collaboration
– community
– spirituality/religion/proselytising
Proposals (comprising a title, 200 word abstract, up to 5 keywords, and a 100 word bio) should be sent to: lifewriting@ucd.ie by Friday March 16th 2018.
Organisers: Prof. Danielle Clarke (School Of English, Drama & Film, UCD) and Prof. John McCafferty (School of History, UCD).
[Image credit: Print by Andrea Meldolla – mid-sixteenth century (Trustees British Museum)]
University College Cork’s Early Music Ensemble (directed by Simon MacHale) and Chamber Music Ensemble (directed by Dr Jillian Rogers) will perform a joint evening concert of chamber and consort music of the fifteenth to eighteenth century on Wednesday 10th May.
This free event will take place in the beautiful nineteenth century surroundings of St. Vincent’s Church, Cork city, at 7.30pm.
St. Vincent’s church, Sunday’s Well, Cork city.
Shakespeare 400 has kept myself and many Irish Shakespeareans busy these past ten months. With many stage productions, screenings, conferences, public lectures, festivals, and workshops to organise, participate in, and attend, both here and abroad, these wonderful events can seem like a burden and the associated demands on one’s personal finances, time etc. present a substantial challenge. (If Shakespeare is sat merrily in a pantheon of literary gods somewhere, I hope he appreciates all the fuss! And while I’m at it, I hope that Jonson, Beaumont, and Cervantes, who have their own anniversaries this year, are giving him a right ribbing!)
Thus, it was a joy to find that the recent launch of the Centre for Early Modern Studies, Limerick, offered an array of pleasures for the weary early modernist. The launch took place on one of October’s prettiest autumn evenings in the inviting surrounds of the Glucksman Library’s Reading Room. Against the backdrop of the green surrounds of the University of Limerick campus, the audience were warmly welcomed by Dr. Richard Kirwan, the chair of CEMS, and his colleagues. Dr. Kirwan paid tribute to the Irish Research Council for their support of CEMS (via a New Foundations grant) and to his scholarly and administrative collaborators across the disciplines in Mary Immaculate and UL who were instrumental in establishing the new Centre.
The importance and value of collaboration and networking seemed to be something of a theme for the evening, as Prof. Jane Ohlmeyer (TCD) touched on this subject many times during her lecture on “Ireland in the Early Modern World”. The author of several influential monographs, including Making Ireland English: The Irish Aristocracy in the Seventeenth Century (2012) and Ireland from Independence to Occupation, 1641-1660 (2002), Prof. Ohlmeyer presented the audience with many insights into the seventeenth century and into her approaches to and aspirations for early modern research in Ireland.
Prof. Ohlmeyer and Dr. Kirwan in the Glucksman Library, UL (Photo credit: Alan Place)
Prof. Ohlmeyer, who has been recently appointed as Chair of the Irish Research Council, highlighted how collaboration can enrich our studies, enabling us to broaden our knowledge and share it with a national and global community. The lecture and post-Q&A discussions reminded me too of the value of encouragement to and role models for emerging scholars; sometimes only senior scholars can take on new initiatives and create opportunities in our fields and the importance of their leading by example cannot be underestimated. Prof. Ohlmeyer continued to urge the audience to apply for funding for research projects and to take advantage of the excellent resources which Irish research has already produced. Should we need inspiration, the fruits of such successful bids were in evidence before us – the foundation of the Centre for Early Modern Studies, Limerick and the digitisation of the 1641 Depositions (a project funded by the IRC, AHRC, and TCD), which Prof. Ohlmeyer discussed during her talk. Prof. Ohlmeyer stressed too the significance of the Bolton Collection; not only do its treasures make Limerick a desirable place to conduct research on the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Collection can help us to reconstruct and understand Ireland’s place in the early modern world.
Prof. Ohlmeyer (TCD, IRC) speaking in the Glucksman Library, UL
Prof. Ohlmeyer’s wide-ranging, illustrated talk on the position of early modern Ireland and its global connections combined a ‘big picture’ approach with fascinating detail. The audience learned of the exotic items found in a washpit in Rathfarnham Castle in 2014. This treasure trove of objects, including shoes, buttons, jewellery, and jars of cosmetics, demonstrated that the Loftus family were fashion conscious and on top of the latest trends. The Castle’s inhabitants were also consumers of luxuries from far flung lands; the pit contained evidence of tea, coffee, and sugar from the West Indies, and dozens of pipes were found, the tobacco likely sourced from South America. A Spanish coin made of silver mined in Peru was also found in the pit.
Rathfarnham Castle hoard (Photo credit: Alva McGowan/IrishArchaeology.ie)
Prof. Ohlmeyer discussed Ireland’s maritime connections, including pineapples arriving in to Ireland in the 1660s and the voyages of Irish sailors to Asia and the Americas. Questioning what did it mean to be ‘Irish’ in the seventeenth century, Prof. Ohlmeyer examined the complex identities of social groups such as Irish Catholics, the Old English, and New English. Prof. Ohlmeyer closed her talk by examining the impact on Ireland of the European global empires in the Atlantic and Eastern worlds. The political, social, and economic effects on Ireland were both large and small. For instance, the audience was much amused to hear of Bailey, an inhabitant of Hacketstown, Co. Carlow, who irately complained to the authorities of the loss of his spices and who suspected that the local insurgents who had stole his cloves, nutmeg, and cinnamon were using them to flavour their morning droughts!
The launch of the Centre for Early Modern Studies, Limerick, concluded with a convivial gathering and looked forward to the next such gathering in Limerick for the Irish Renaissance Seminar in November.
Report by Dr Edel Semple, UCC.
Shakespeare in Ireland 