catherine swift

At the beginning of the twentieth century, W. B. Yeats described various females from Irish saga in the following terms: “After Cuchulainn, we think most of certain great queens—of angry amorous Maeve with her long pale face, of Findabair, her daughter who dies of shame and pity, of Deirdre who might be some mild modern housewife but for her prophetic vision … I think it might be proud Emer … who will linger longest in the memory, whether she is the newly married wife fighting for precedence, fierce as some beautiful bird or the confident housewife who would waken her husband from his magic sleep with mocking words.” A hundred years later, it is the description of early Irish queens as “housewives” that is particularly striking. This perspective is not confined to Yeats’s critical writing but also occurs in his poetry. In the 1893 collection The Rose, the poem Cuchulain’s Fight with the Sea refers repetitively to Emer in a domestic setting, working at the arduous task of preparing cloth: A man came slowly from the setting sun, To Emer, raddling raiment in her dun, Then Emer cast the web upon the floor, And raising arms all raddled with the dye, Parted her lips with a loud sudden cry. “You dare me to my face,” and thereupon She smote with raddled fist.1

This paper looks at the evidence for the particular forms of charism and religious life shared by Brigit and Íte as recorded in their hagiography and suggests that the closest parallels for their social engagement and non-enclosed lifestyles is probably to be found in the Cappadocian traditions associated with St Basil and his elder sister, St Makrina.

An examination of traders in élite furs in eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth-century Dublin, looking at Norwegian descriptions of Dublin, DNA of walruses  and Plantagenet trading networks. As the paper has only just come out, this is only the first couple of pages. Published by Four Courts Press and available through their catalogue.

There are many palmers identified by name in late twelfth-century and early thirteenth-century Dublin. In this paper I argue that many  represent the men who helped transport the Crusaders to the Holy Land during the Third Crusade and who subsequently sought their fortune as merchant traders in  King John's burgeoning colony. Volume edited by Edward Coleman, Paul Duffy and Tadhg O'Keeffe

A study of the community described in the little known Vita Mochullei of Tulla in central Clare. The life occurs in the Magnum Legendarium Austriacum and is dated to AD 1185 or before. Stefan Weber argued in 2010 that the text was either edited or created by the author of Vita Mariani of Regensburg, a feature which it shares with the Vita Flannani, the patron of Killaloe, Co. Clare. See also Donnchadh Ó Corráin, "Foreign connections" in 1982.

In this paper, the political and social context for the early Cistercian foundation of Monasternenagh, as a foundation of the Uí Bhriain rulers of Thomond and its importance in the economy of Ireland's Mid-West in the later 12th C and early 13th C is examined in depth.

I'm afraid I don't have a hard copy of this (its over twenty years old at this stage - oh dear) and there is a problem with the scanning - my apologies.  I think at this remove I'd be happier arguing for a dindshenchas reinterpretation of standing monuments especially since John Waddell's work on the Knockans of Teltown and at Dathí's mound at Rathcroghan which seems to show an early medieval interest in prehistoric monuments and their reinterpretation.

Oireachtas is a later medieval Irish word which seems to evolve from
earlier terms such as airecht but which was chosen as the most appropriate
word for the legislature of a newly independent Ireland at a time when
Irish society was expressing a considerable interest in its ancestral roots
and in an ethnic identity expressed by use of Irish terminology. This
paper explores the evidence for the submission of agricultural renders to
higher political authorities at such assemblies and their ultimate redistribution
across both higher and lower levels in Irish society. It is argued
that there is little or no evidence for the presence of large numbers of
craftsmen engaged in creating goods for sale (as occurred, for example,
in Norse market assemblies) at a medieval Irish oireachtas. It is,
however, clear that political and legislative assemblies, concerned with
political submission, judicial penalties and the material wealth generated
by both, were a key element in encouraging the circulation of goods
in the medieval Irish economy and that such assemblies could but did
not necessarily take place in the immediate vicinity of fortified urban
settlements. This has implications for our understanding of medieval
Irish trade, of the organisation of manufacture and of the role of towns in
Irish-speaking society from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries.

The nineteenth-century context in which most of our surname history was created is analysed and discussed and it is suggested that future research should expand the data on surname origins within Ireland beyond the traditional focus on the pedigrees of land-owners.

this paper looks at how leaders in 12th C Ireland gained agricultural or commodity wealth from their subjects and how they transformed this into monetary or at any rate metallurgical resources with the help of foreign merchants of largely Scandinavian and English extraction

This paperexamines the contrast between the archaeological evidence for Viking weaponry - which is relatively widespread on the island of Ireland - and the evidence for the adoption of Norse language which seems to be relatively scant. By concentrating on Middle Irish literature produced in the Hiberno-Norse era, it appears that Irishmen adopted both the military technology and also some of the tactics of the invaders.

This paper is a follow up to a paper written by Margaret Nieke in 1993. Investigation has indicated the value of Margaret Nieke’s observations in 1991. She saw the Pictish brooches as important indicators of social position (both secular and religious) and she argued that there may have been sumptuary laws in operation which governed the wearing of brooches of particular design and decoration. She also suggested that to understand their true value for the society which produce them, it is important to understand more about their use in the negotiation of contemporary social relations.
Using literary and legal texts written in Old Irish/Old Gàidlig as our primary source of evidence, it has been suggested here that while there may not have been sumptuary laws as such, the conventions governing the style and construction of these brooches did indeed indicate the status of the individual wearing them to the observer. These conventions appear to have become increasingly standardized over time as social hierarchies appear to have become more deterministic and membership of a particular dynasty, rather than one’s age, became the key distinguishing factor. The literary evidence is clear that the function of these brooches was to fasten outer garments or cloaks and as such they were worn by all ranks of society as well as by women and professional religious. Despite the sculptural evidence from Hilton of Cadboll, there is no evidence in the documentary sources that women wore their brooch in a distinctive manner. The same words could be used of brooches made in a variety of metals although, on the whole, it appears that the base metals were confined to lower ranks in society while gold was seen as the mark of royalty. As time goes on, this mark of royalty seems, in both Ireland and Alba, to have been increasingly confined to the national and provincial kings rather than to those of lower ranks. Silver – the metal most often used of the Pictish brooches – appears to have been worn exclusively by lords and they seem to have been willing to let their brooches be pledged by their subordinates on occasion.
In terms of pure bullion, the value of Pictish brooches is not particularly high but the evidence of vernacular law tracts can be used to indicate the social value: the majority of the brooches were of silver gilt and of comparatively low silver content with only one, Brooch no. 25, having a silver content of 82%. In such a context, the notion that in pure monetary value a Pictish brooch might be considered as rather less than the annual fee for the fostering of a royal child or something over half the cost of hitting a king so that he bleeds or the cost of burying a royal corpse in a church yard is worth bearing in mind. On the other hand, and to reinforce the point that the values of the society we are studying are not necessarily ours, one should also note that a Pictish brooch was considered as being rather more valuable than a man’s hand if the latter was so foolish as to attack a king, a scholar or a bishop. It is also worth noting that those sums considered comparable all involve royalty or the very highest ranks of the professions – the fines and fees available to lower classes in society were considerably less.

In the light of statistics relating to 19th C distribution of surnames studied by the authors of a 2006 genetics paper by Moore et al, it seems hardly surprising that the IMH haplotype identified in modern volunteers bearing surnames associated with SOME descendants of Niall of Nine Hostages, was found predominantly in Donegal and the surrounding area. What is less clear, however, is whether we are justified in assuming that the best explanation for this pattern is a relationship between these twenty-first century men and the eponymous ancestor of the Uí  Néill kingdoms who appears to have reigned in the generation before Patrick arrived in Ireland. There is little historical evidence for population names or dynastic families recorded on our fifth-century texts inscribed on ogam stones. The associations of such names as survive from the fifth century with the later surnames of the tenth, eleventh and twelfth centuries is only very rarely recorded and even then, the surviving names appear to relate to territories and land-units rather than to individual family pedigrees. The genealogies recorded in the seventeenth century can often vary substantially even from those recorded in the fourteenth century, let alone those of earlier date. Most importantly, however, the geneticists have limited their data to individuals whose families are associated both genealogically and geographically with the north-west and have not included any of those families descended from the kings of the eastern midlands who also claimed descent from Niall. This undermines the potential  of the study to reveal the genetic characteristics associated with this fifth-century dynast.

Some early Irish priests lived on farms not very different from those of their lay neighbours and in houses which could have servants and multi-generational family members as residents. Though sustained by a mixed agricultural economy, priests were debarred from physical work and their animals came not from local tenants but from a contract with their ecclesiastical
princeps, supplemented by what they raised themselves through their own local activities. Their duties included not just the performance of sacraments for their congregations but also an important role as judges, being respected for their ability to identify suitable penalties with due regard for the specific context of a particular case and the true remorse of a perpetrator. They could be fosterers, educators and writers of bardic poetry and laments as well as being occasionally called upon to assist those who sought otherworldly aid in achieving happiness in love.

This is the paper of a talk I gave at the Institute of Irish Studies in the University of Liverpool many years ago, shortly after Atlantic Celts first came out. Because it remains an important teaching text, I thought it worth putting this up (I've just moved offices) although there's things here I no longer agree with such as lack of Norse loanwords into Irish - and Harolds Cross does not have an apostrophe!

This is a copy of a talk given to the Emly Historical Society on 4th November 2015. In it I argue that the contest between Patrick and Ailbe represents a proxy fight between Eóganacht and Dál Cais rather than between Emly and Armagh. I also suggest that the model of rulership at Emly was drawn from Gregory the Great's book on Pastoral Care.

This was a paper given at the Back to Our Past, Genetic Genealogy conference in the RDS in October 2015. It represents an update of a previous paper entitled "Blood of the Dubliners" benefiting particularly from recent archaeological publications.

Paper given at Research day, Mary Immaculate College, 2nd  September 2014.  The paper looks at the ethnic diversity of medieval Limerick surnames in the light of geneticists conclusions that the population of the west of Ireland is largely the result of Mesolithic migration and is only minimally affected by subsequent arrivals. A subsidiary conclusion is that the Norman surnames attested in the medieval colony are spread throughout the island  for the most part and are not limited to single geographical districts.

This paper explores medieval evidence for surnames in Ireland as they are affected by the conditions of a multilingual colony where the royal Angevin base of Limerick, the Irish kingdom of Thomond and the baronial interests of Norman settlers all provide different poles of attraction for families trying to make their way. This paper was given at the Genealogy Event, Adare  Saturday 22nd August 2015

This is a paper given to a conference on Brian Boru held in TCD on April 11th 2014. It is a predecessor to a paper given in the RDS in October 2014 and there are certain areas of overlap. The main function of both papers is to explore the historical and genealogical justifications for the claims made about the nature of Dál Cais overlordship in a genetics paper by McEvoy et al. in “Genetic Investigation of the Patrilineal KinshipStructure of Early Medieval Ireland” published in American Journal of Physical Anthropology 2008

Studies of Irish surnames and by-names have been based on the assumption that the language used in creating the surname represented the ethnic background of those who used it. This examination of records from 13th and 14th C Limerick makes it clear that the same individual could have his surname recorded in a variety of different languages and that suranme analysis is therefore no guide to original ethnic identity.

This is a paper given at the Church of Ireland parish of Bangor Abbey on Tueday 12th May 2015 in honour of the feast of St Comgall and in the context of the commemorations of St Columbanus in 2015. It arises out of work done for a forthcoming monograph to be published by Four Courts Press, entitled "Candles of God's Household: men and women of the early Irish church".

This paper revisits John Bradley's 1994 paper on the twelfth century settlement of Killaloe, adding further details to the landscape context in the light of more recent documentary and archaeological research on the social institutions of early Ireland, especially in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. This paper was given to the joint conference organised by the Group on Irish Historical Settlement and the American Society for Irish Medieval Studies at All Hallows, Dublin in February 201.

This was a paper given as part of a series on Goddesses of Ireland organised by the OPW at the Tara Heritage Centre in 2011. The paper collects together a number of saga and legal references from early medieval Ireland which depict Irish women in their domestic setting.

This is the powerpoint accompanying  a paper to the Blood, Battles and Burials seminar hosted by Dublinia on the 16th November 2013. Essentially it represents an investigation of the 2006 paper which argued that there was little DNA evidence for substantial migration of Scandinavians to Ireland and this is done through examination of the earliest attested naming formulae from medieva Dublin.

The attached paper was given at the Society for Name Studies in Britain and Ireland (publishers of the journal NOMINA) at their conference in Athenry in April 2013. It provides a number of examples of medievally attested names from the mid West region based largely on analysis of Brian Hodkinson's Who's Who of Medieval Limerick (available on-line via Limerick City Museum Local History Sources).

This paper represents an attempt to investigate the specific charisms associated with individual saints whose biographies identify them as belonging to early medieval Ireland. The paper was given at the University of St Thomas, Houston - and the video is uploaded on their video archive: http://videoarchive.stthom.edu/index.php?option=com_jmovies&Itemid=54&task=detail&id=419

This paper looks at the evolution of Irish and English language surnames in a frontier zone with a mixed linguistic population during the High Middle Ages and uses that evidence to contextualise DNA studies about O'Brien ancestry.  This talk was given to the Irish Genetic Genealogy conference held in the RDS in October 2014 and is available on their website as a podcast https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nPnMk2ZBsG0

A wonderful international line-up celebrating Limerick's history from the fall of Brian Boru at the battle of Clontarf through to the building of King John's Castle and the creation of the Black Book of Limerick. Supported by the Irish Research Council under the aegis of the Thomond Archaeological and Historical Society

The story of early Cistercians in Ireland has concentrated on the ethnic divisions between language groups and, thanks to work by Roger Stalley,  on their architectural styles. This blog post looks more closely at the economics of their activities in Limerick.

part of a blog on medieval history of Limerick - designed to accompany a festival in Limerick, 28th-31st October 2019 on Limerick's identity as a frontier city populated by diverse ethnicities and  cultures in the later twelfth and first half of the thirteenth centuries

part of a blog on medieval history of Limerick - designed to accompany a festival in Limerick, 28th-31st October 2019 on Limerick's identity as a frontier city populated by diverse ethnicities and  cultures in the later twelfth and first half of the thirteenth centuries. See www.medievalhistoryfestivallimerick.home.blog

part of a blog on medieval history of Limerick - designed to accompany a festival in Limerick, 28th-31st October 2019 on Limerick's identity as a frontier city populated by diverse ethnicities and  cultures in the later twelfth and first half of the thirteenth century - see www.medievalhistoryfestivallimerick.home.blog

part of a blog on medieval history of Limerick - designed to accompany a festival in Limerick, 28th-31st October 2019 on Limerick's identity as a frontier city populated by diverse ethnicities and  cultures in the later twelfth and first half of the thirteenth century; see www.medievalhistoryfestivallimerick.home.blog.

This was an M.Phil thesis done in Durham under the supervision of Professor Rosemary Cramp in the 1980s which has now been made publically available via their ethesis system.  It is somewhat outdated in terms of published data from individual sites from both Ireland and Scotland at this stage but the general problems about the interpretation of small chapel sites and their social function(s) are still live ones - as witnessed in papers given in TCD at the 17th Friends of Medieval Dublin seminar last Saturday (17th May 2015). Do they represent early attempts at provision of widespread pastoral care? family chapel sites? or early "monasteries" or at least monastic "granges" or some sort of amalgam of all of these?