Dimensions of Europe Lunch Lecture - Ciaran McDonough

Expertise, Sectarianism, and Nationalism in mid-nineteenth-century Ireland: The Brehon Law Commission and its Minute Book

Across the second half of the nineteenth century in Ireland, a large project took place to translate the corpus of medieval Irish law. Involving numerous scholars and a large steering committee of mostly noblemen, how the project unfolded was meticulously noted by its secretary Charles Graves. The project was a microcosm of wider society at the time, with a group of mostly Protestant members of the steering committee having power over the Catholic scholars. This talk will present the contents of the project Minute Book (Royal Irish academy 24 0 39/CG/BL 1) and explain what these findings tell us about sectarianism in nineteenth-century Ireland and how this impacted upon how expertise as viewed. 

Dr Ciaran McDonough is currently a postdoctoral research assistant on the ERC Consolidator grant-funded project 'Classical Influences and Irish Culture'. She was awarded a PhD from the University of Galway in 2017 and has been a Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Researcher at University College Dublin and a Marie Skłodowska Curie Fellow at the University of Iceland.