VOICES
VOICES: Life and Death, War and Peace, c.1550-c.1700: Voices of Women in Early Modern Ireland is a five-year European Research Council (ERC) Advanced Grant project led by Professor Jane Ohlmeyer in the School of Histories and Humanities, TCD. It commenced in September 2023 and is hosted by the Trinity Long Room Hub Arts and Humanities Institute, in partnership with the Department of History in the School of Histories and Humanities, and the Science Foundation Ireland ADAPT Research Centre hosted in the School of Computer Science and Statistics in Trinity.
VOICES aims to recover the voices and interrogate lived experiences of ‘ordinary’, non-elite women in early modern Ireland. Ireland formed part of the British, European, and Atlantic world and women there responded to similar sets of transformative processes as other early modern women – proto-globalisation, state formation, confessionalisation, warfare, commercialisation, environmental change, and so on – which facilitates interrogation that is comparative, connected, and entangled.
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About
About
Two ambitious research questions underpin this pioneering project which focuses on Ireland as a case study:
First: what roles did women play in a society undergoing profound economic, political, and cultural transformation?
Second: what were their experiences of recurring social upheaval, bloody civil war and extreme trauma, especially sexual violence, and how have these been politicised?
VOICES: Life and Death, War and Peace, c.1550-c.1700: Voices of Women in Early Modern Ireland is a five-year European Research Council (ERC) Advanced Grant project led by Professor Jane Ohlmeyer in the School of Histories and Humanities, TCD. It commenced in September 2023 and is hosted by the Trinity Long Room Hub Arts and Humanities Institute, in partnership with the Department of History in the School of Histories and Humanities, and the Science Foundation Ireland ADAPT Research Centre hosted in the School of Computer Science and Statistics in Trinity.
VOICES aims to recover the voices and interrogate lived experiences of ‘ordinary’, non-elite women in early modern Ireland. Ireland formed part of the British, European, and Atlantic world and women there responded to similar sets of transformative processes as other early modern women – proto-globalisation, state formation, confessionalisation, warfare, commercialisation, environmental change, and so on – which facilitates interrogation that is comparative, connected, and entangled.
Hypothesis
Sources
These include qualitative sources like the 1641 Depositions, legal records, wills, and inquisitions, cartographic ones like the Down Survey Maps, together with more quantitative materials – surveys, censuses, networks of lending and borrowing preserved in Statute Staple records, and the Books of Survey and Distribution.
Many of these sources (the 1641 Depositions and Statute Staple records) have been digitised as part of initiatives led or co-led by Professor Ohlmeyer. Others are available as part of the ongoing Virtual Treasury project, a landmark initiative which aims to reconstitute Ireland’s national archives destroyed in 1922.
Funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon Europe Research & Innovation programme under grant agreement No 101097003.