Tudor & Stuart Ireland conference

Members of the Church of Ireland Historical Society are cordially invited to attend the fifth annual Tudor & Stuart Ireland interdisciplinary conference, which will be held at Maynooth University on 28-29 August 2015. This year’s conference features plenary addresses by Professor Alexandra Walsham (University of Cambridge) and Professor Marie-Louise Coolahan (NUI Galway), as well as thirty speakers from Ireland and beyond who will present papers on current research relating to early modern Ireland.

The two keynote lectures may be of particular interest to members of COIHS. Professor Walsham will deliver a paper entitled ‘The Pope’s merchandise and the Jesuits’ trumpery: Catholic relics and Protestant polemic in early modern Britain’ on Friday evening at 6.15pm, while Professor Coolahan will give a lecture ‘Reportage, rhyme, and religion: How to drum up a reputation in early modern Ireland’. This will be the concluding paper of the conference on Saturday at 5pm.

There are other sessions and/or papers of note. A session entitled ‘Protestantism, community, and identity’ will feature papers by Professor Raymond Pierre Hylton (Virginia Union University) and Dr Marie Leoutre (National Library of Ireland) – The Mercantile element in Dublin’s Huguenot refuge and its catalytic effect, 1650-1750; Dr Marc Caball (University College Dublin) – A tale of two seventeenth-century libraries: the world views of a Limerick patrician and a Cork landowner; and Mr Liam Maloney (independent scholar) – The Earl of Orrery and the defence of the Protestant interest in the settlement of Ireland.

Other presentations that members may be interested in will include a paper by Mr Paul Murray (independent scholar) who will talk about ‘Puritanism and the formation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula’ as well as Dr Brendan Scott who will deliver a paper on ‘Thomas Jones, Elizabethan bishop of Meath’.

Among the other thematic sessions, papers will explore a range of topics to include ‘gender and violence in seventeenth-century Ireland’, ‘courtly culture and intrigue’, and ‘literature and the (mis)information of identity’. Further details about this year’s conference can be found at www.tudorstuartireland.com. All are most welcome to attend.

The fifth annual Tudor & Stuart Ireland interdisciplinary conference is generously supported by the Irish Research Council New Foundations scheme, Marsh’s Library, the department of history and the Graduate Studies Office at Maynooth University, and the UCD School of History and Archives.