Symposium: ‘Shakespeare the Irishman’ – 14 April 2023

A one-day symposium as part of the 400th anniversary of the publication of the first collected edition of Shakespeare’s plays.

The Trinity Long Room Hub Arts and Humanities Research Institute at Trinity College Dublin will host a one day symposium under the title ‘Shakespeare the Irishman’ from 9am to 5pm on Friday 14th April.

The symposium is hosted by Prof Andy Murphy of Trinity’s School of English and it will feature papers from Neil Rhodes (University of St Andrews, UK), and from Mark Burnett, Emer McHugh and Molly Quinn-Leitch (Queens University Belfast); Patrick Lonergan and David O’Shaughnessy (University of Galway); Stephen O’Neill (Maynooth University); Jason McElligott (Marsh’s Library) and Marc Caball (University College Dublin).

The event is open to the public and is free to attend, but registration is required. See eventbrite for tickets.

The symposium is part of a week-long series of events at Trinity celebrating the four hundredth anniversary of the publication of the Shakespeare First Folio, including an exhibition in the Long Room of the Old Library, an online exhibition, and a public lecture by Prof Andy Murphy on the history and significance of the First Folio and of Trinity’s own copy of the volume on Wednesday 12th April. Attendance at the lecture is open to the public free of charge, but registration is required.

Symposium Program:
9:00-9:15 Introduction & welcome – Andy Murphy
9:15-10:00 Stephen O’Neill (Maynooth): ‘”This earth shall have feeling”: Looking for (Irish) Roots in Shakespeare’s Richard II’
10:00-10:45 David O’Shaughnessy (Galway): ‘Shakespeare and Irish Patriotism: Thomas Sheridan’s Coriolanus (1752)’
10:45-11:00 Break
11:00-11:45 Marc Caball (UCD) & Jason McElligott (Marsh’s Library): ‘Tralee, 1756: Shakespeare on the Atlantic Edge’
11:45-12:30 Molly Quinn-Leitch (QUB): ‘The Presence of Shakespeare Material Traces in Victorian Belfast (1837-1901)’
12:30-1:30 Lunch
1:30-2:15 Neil Rhodes (St Andrews): ‘Shakespeare and Yeats’
2:15-3:00 Patrick Lonergan (Galway): ‘Hamlet the Irishman’
3:00-3:15 Break
3:15-4:00 Emer McHugh (QUB): ‘Siobhán McKenna’s “Experimental Version” of Hamlet, or, Some Reflections on Writing About Irish Shakespeare Performance’
4:00-4:45 Mark Thornton Burnett (QUB): ‘Ireland’s Shakespeare: Cinematic Histories/Social Justice’
4:45-5:00 Close

Shakespeare’s First Folio in the Folger Shakespeare Library (This file is made available under the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication)

Talk: “The Book that Gave Us Shakespeare: Four Hundred Years of the First Folio” – 12 April 2023

As part of the celebrations of the 400th anniversary of the publication of the first collected edition of Shakespeare’s plays – the ‘First Folio’ – Prof Andy Murphy of the School of English at Trinity College Dublin will give a public lecture at the Trinity Long Room Hub Arts and Humanities Research Institute on the history of the volume and why it is so important. Trinity holds the only copy of the First Folio on the island of Ireland and Prof Murphy will also speak about the particular features of the Trinity copy, including examining some of the peculiar marks and inscriptions to be found in the book.

The event is open to the public and is free to attend, but registration is required – see eventbrite here.

Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland

Lecture: Dr Margaret Connolly (St Andrews), Trinity Long Room Hub, 21 January

Reading Continuities in an Age of Change: Some 15th Century Manuscripts and their Tudor Owners

Thursday, 21 January 2016 | 18:15 | Trinity Long Room Hub

A public lecture by Dr Margaret Connolly (University of St Andrews) during her term as a Visiting Research Fellow at the Trinity Long Room Hub in collaboration with the School of English.

Bio: Dr Margaret Connolly is an Honorary Research Fellow in the School of English at the University of St Andrews. Dr Connolly’s field of study is medieval English literature, with a particular emphasis on the manuscript contexts in which Middle English texts survive. She has worked on both scribal production and reader reception, and has edited and catalogued medieval texts.

Abstract: This lecture will consider ways in which early modern readers continued to use old medieval books, taking as its focus a group of eight fifteenth-century manuscripts owned by a single English gentry family in the sixteenth century. Although these volumes were used in various ways (as a repository for family records; as a safe place to preserve important material; as a source of practical household information; and as a professional lawyer’s manual), primarily, Dr Connolly will argue, they were used quite simply as books, that is, that they were read. Many of the original texts in these manuscripts are of a devotional nature, and a special point of interest is the disjunction between these textual products of a wholly Catholic age and the reformist religious environment that their Tudor readers inhabited, especially after the 1530s. The lecture will consider evidence of annotations, comments, and other markings (and also places left unmarked), in order to try to interpret the nature of these later readers’ engagement with their old medieval books.

 

Lecture: Prof Andrew Pettegree (St Andrews) at Trinity College Dublin, 18 January

 

‘Brand Luther: 1517, Printing and the Making of the Reformation’

Trinity Long Room Hub, 18 January, 4pm

A public lecture by Prof Andrew Pettegree (St Andrews) during his Visiting Research Fellowship at the Trinity Long Room Hub. This lecture is part of the Trinity Centre for Early Modern History Research Seminar Series 2015-16.

CFP: The Medical World of Early Modern Ireland, 1500-1750

Conference Dates: 3-4 September 2015
Conference Venue: The Long Room Hub, Trinity College Dublin
Organised By: The Centre for Medical History, University of Exeter
Supported By: The Wellcome Trust
Hosted By: The Centre for Early Modern History, Trinity College Dublin
In Co-operation With: The Centre for the History of Medicine in Ireland at University College Dublin and the University of Ulster

The medical world of early modern Ireland was not only rooted in a society undergoing rapid transformation but also increasingly connected to transnational networks of migration, education, trade and ideas. It was profoundly shaped from within by changes such as the collapse of the Gaelic order, and from without by factors including the curricula of continental universities. A growing body of research is now enabling a more nuanced understanding of this complex and variegated world. Yet Irish medical historiography was recently and quite reasonably described as a field where ‘the modern period overwhelms the early modern’. Synchronic comparison, most notably with England, also reinforces the impression of early modern Irish medical history as a still relatively underdeveloped subject.

These circumstances point towards the continued need for a greater and sustained scholarly engagement with the history of medicine in early modern Ireland. Moreover, the wide range of contexts encompassed by the subject, social, cultural, linguistic, intellectual, institutional, confessional and so on, highlights the particular importance of on going knowledge exchange and collaborations between scholars. Such endeavour is also vital to enabling better awareness of the contents of, and challenges posed by, a frequently problematic archival base. The fact that many of the types of early modern source available for other countries were in Ireland either never created in the first place or subsequently destroyed is obviously of enormous consequence. At the same time, some rich and distinctive elements, such as Gaelic medical manuscript culture, are beyond the expertise of many historians.

This conference is designed to meet these and other challenges by bringing together scholars working on the history of medicine in Ireland in the period 1500-1750. It will allow them to present the findings of latest research, whether focused on the island itself, relevant transnational contexts, or both. Under the aegis of the ambitious Early Modern Practitioners project at the University of Exeter, the conference is intended as a benchmark event that will facilitate appraisal of the current state of the subject and help towards defining the parameters of a sustainable future research agenda.

Proposals are accordingly invited for papers of 20-25 minutes duration that will address key aspects of the medical world of early modern Ireland. Major themes for consideration include the following:

– Continuity and change in the character and scope of medical practice, including the impact of conquest and plantation on pre-existing medical culture, the influence of new ideas and/or persistence of established approaches across the period, as well as the significance of attempts at regulation.

– Trends in education, training and career patterns, encompassing hereditary succession, patronage, apprenticeship and university study.

– The roles played by women, in popular and domestic medicine and beyond.

– The place of medicine within processes of social and cultural change in Ireland more generally, and the wider parts played by medical practitioners in scientific, intellectual, political, military, confessional and other spheres.

Contributions from early career researchers and postgraduate research students are particularly welcome and limited financial support is available to help with travel and conference costs on application.

Please send c. 200 word abstracts of proposed papers by email to the conference organiser Dr John Cunningham (cunninjo@tcd.ie) by 6 March 2015.

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Seminar Series: Centre for Early Modern History, TCD

Trinity College Dublin Centre for Early Modern History
Seminar Series 2014-15
Seminars take place on Mondays at 4.00pm in the Neill/ Hoey Lecture Theatre of the Long Room Hub, TCD.

Michaelmas Term

13 October Joseph Clarke (TCD), ‘“What was God doing in the eighteenth century?”: The Politics of Providence in Revolutionary France’.
20 October Kathleen Middleton (TCD), ‘Mainstreaming the Martyrs: Confessional History Writing in Hanoverian Scotland’.
3 November Reading Week
10 November Patrick Little (History of Parliament Trust, London), ‘The Politics of Preferment: the Marquess of Ormond and the Appointment of Bishops, 1643-1647’.
17 November Rei Kanemura (QUB), ‘Defining Scotland: The 1603 Union of the Crowns and the Politics of Union Negotiations, 1604-8’.
24 November Peter Boyle (TCD), ‘Eighteenth-Century Trinity: a Quarrelsome Provost’.
1 December Máire Kennedy (Dublin City Public Libraries), ‘Irish Booksellers and the Circulation of Enlightenment Ideas through Print’.
8 December David O’Shaughnessy (TCD), “Bit by some mad whig”: Charles Macklin, Man of the World’.

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Hilary Term

19 January Edoardo Tortorolo (Università degli Studi del Piemonte Orientale), ‘(More) Connected Worlds: the Eighteenth Century from a Global Perspective.’
26 January Timothy Watt (QUB), ‘Taxation Riots and the Resistance to the Fiscal-Military State in Early Eighteenth-Century Ireland’.
2 February Susan Flavin (TCD), ‘Consuming Elites: Diet and Nutrition in Sixteenth-Century Ireland’.
9 February Emma Hart (St. Andrews), ‘From Field to Plate: Livestock Markets and Economic Cultures in Britain’s Atlantic World Before 1783’.
16 February Hannah Murphy (Oxford), ‘How to be a Burghermeister in Sixteenth-Century Germany’.
23 February Reading Week
2 March Silvia Evangelisti (Univeristy of East Anglia), title tbc.
9 March Howard Louthan (University of Florida), ‘Poland and the Challenge of Multiconfessionalism in Early Modern Europe’.
12 March Ulinka Rublack (University of Cambridge), ‘Dressing up during the Renaissance and Reformation’. Annual Centre for Early Modern History Annual Lecture. N.B. this lecture begins at 6.30 pm.
18 March Dan Edelstein (Stanford), ‘On the Spirit of the Rights’. N. B. This seminar will start at 5.30pm in the Long Room Hub.

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For further details of the Centre’s activities, please contact Joseph Clarke at joseph.clarke@tcd.ie

Public Lecture: Remembering the Reformation, Trinity Long Room Hub

Dr. Margot Kässmann, Remembering the Reformation: Challenges of the 2017 Centenary,

23rd September 2014, 6pm, Trinity Long Room Hub, Trinity College, Dublin

For more information see: Reformationlecture2

With thanks to Dr. Graeme Murdock