Book launch on Thursday 29th June

At 6.30pm on Thursday 29th June we shall be launching:

Mícheál Ó Mainnín, Annexing Irish Names to the English Tongue: Language Contact and the Anglicisation of Irish Place-Names, Paul Walsh Memorial Lecture 2 (Maynooth, 2017)

during the wine reception in the foyer of the Iontas Building. The publication will be launched by Dr Nollaig Ó Muraíle.

3rd Annual Paul Walsh Memorial Lecture

We are delighted to announce that the Third Annual Paul Walsh Memorial Lecture will also be the second plenary lecture at this year’s ICM. This year’s lecturer is Professor Richard Sharpe (University of Oxford), and the title of his lecture is Vexilla Regis: From the Banner of St Peter to the Banners of Rome”. The lecture will take place at 5pm on Friday 30th June in the Iontas Lecture Theatre (North Campus) and is open to the public. Richard Sharpe is Professor of Diplomatic at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Wadham College, and is a leading expert in medieval British and Irish history, medieval Latin, historiography, book history, and textual editing.

Fr Paul Walsh (1885-1941) was appointed Lecturer in Welsh at St Patrick’s College Maynooth in 1916, and he subsequently became Professor of Ecclesiastical History there. He was a prolific scholar and historian, with publications ranging across many aspects of Irish history, ecclesiastical history, onomastics, genealogy, and history of scholarship. The establishment of the Annual Paul Walsh Memorial Lecture by the School of Celtic Studies in Maynooth University in 2015 marked both the long history of the discipline of Celtic Studies at Maynooth and the ongoing scholarly collaborations between (the ecclesiastical) St Patrick’s College Maynooth and (the secular) Maynooth University.

Plenary Lecture

We are delighted to announce that the first plenary lecture of the 31st Irish Conference of Medievalists will be delivered by Professor Robin Chapman Stacey (University of Washington) on the topic of “Thinking Proverbially about Medieval Welsh Law”. Robin Chapman Stacey is the author of The Road to Judgement: From Custom to Court in Medieval Ireland and Wales (Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1994) and Dark Speech: The Performance of Law in Early Ireland (Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), and she is a leading authority on medieval law and its relationship with language and literature. We are delighted to be welcoming her to Maynooth for the 31st ICM.

New Directions in Medieval Religion

The 31st Irish Conference of Medievalists which will be held at Maynooth University, County Kildare, from 29 June – 1 July 2017 is pleased to announce that Irish Theological Quarterly, the international peer-reviewed journal of the Faculty of Theology, St Patrick’s College, Maynooth, will sponsor a panel at this year’s conference.

The panel is entitled “New Directions in Medieval Religion” and invites proposals for 20-minute papers which broadly fall into this category. Proposals which deal with medieval theology are of course welcome, but by no means should applicants confine themselves to this area. Papers which examine the world of medieval religion more broadly – including areas such as biblical exegesis, liturgy, canon law, religious life, devotional texts, hagiography, pilgrimage, etc. – are also encouraged.

Applicants who wish to be considered for this panel should submit a proposal which includes:

  • Name
  • Postal address
  • Email address
  • Institutional affiliation
  • Title of proposal
  • 300-word abstract

Successful applicants will have their travel expenses (economy airfare) to the conference covered and also two nights’ accommodation (bed and breakfast). They will also agree to submit a longer version of their paper (7,000 words) for publication in Irish Theological Quarterly within six months of the conference date[1].

Given the title of the panel, proposals which offer fresh and innovative approaches to their topics are especially welcome.

All proposals for this panel should be forwarded to Salvador.ryan@spcm.ie and will thereafter be considered by the organising committee.

The deadline for receipt of proposals for this panel is: Friday 3rd March.


[1] Although it is our hope that all three papers will be published in ITQ, this is ultimately the decision of the journal’s Editorial Board.