English, Media and Creative Arts

My current research project will provide a comprehensive, long-term study of the experiences and activities of Irish women religious from 1530 down to the mid-eighteenth century, a period of tumultuous religious change and upheaval. The suppression of religious houses in Ireland during the 1530s and 1540s marked an abrupt end to a formal way of religious life, which traced its origins back to the early Christian Church. While we know a good deal about the experiences of Irish male religious in the aftermath of the monastic suppression campaigns, and about women religious in England and Europe, by contrast the Irish female experience has been largely overlooked in the historiography of early modern Ireland and European female monasticism. My project will address that lacuna in existing scholarship by examining the ways in which Irish women religious negotiated their survival in the aftermath of the religious reforms of the 1530s and 1540s down to the mid-eighteenth century.