Women and the Church: Christ Church lectures

Christ Church Cathedral Dublin is hosting a summer lunchtime lecture series every Tuesday from 30 June to 21 July on ‘Women & the Church’. In a series of four lectures they will explore the role of women and the church ranging from the medieval period to the modern day.

Held in the cathedral’s spacious and refurbished music room, the first of the lectures on Tuesday 30 June will be given by Dr Maeve Callan (Simpson College in Indianola, Iowa), who has recently published her book The templars, the witch, and the wild Irish: vengeance and heresy in medieval Ireland (Four Courts Press, 2015). Her paper is entitled ‘Witchcraft, heresy, magic & gender in the fourteenth-century Anglo-Irish colony’. The second lecture will be given on Tuesday 7 July by Tracy Collins, a professional archaeologist who is a co-director of Aegis Archaeology. Her lecture title will be ‘Nuns in medieval Ireland: the other monasticism’.

Emerging from the medieval period, the third lecture will be given on Tuesday 14 July by Dr Clodagh Tait (Mary Immaculate College, Limerick). Her topic will be ‘Motherhood from the pages of seventeenth-century parish registers’. The final lecture will be given on Tuesday 21 July by a former member of the cathedral chapter and one of the first women ordained in the Church of Ireland, the Revd Canon Dr Virginia Kennerley, entitled ‘25 years at the altar: Have women priests changed the church?’.

All lectures are at 1.15pm in the music room on the Tuesdays between 30 June and 21 July. Admission is free. See the flyer here: Women and the Church

The series has been generously supported by the Friends of Christ Church Cathedral, Dublin, and all are most warmly invited to attend.