Ciaran McDonough

What relevance did medieval Irish law have in the nineteenth century?

Fimmtudaginn 2. nóvember 2023 kl. 16.30 / Thursday, November 2, 2023, at 16.30
Fyrirlestrasal Eddu / Edda auditorium

The project to translate the corpus of medieval Irish law was the antiquarian project of the longest duration in nineteenth-century Ireland, running between 1853 and 1901. At its inception, the proposed legal translations were widely anticipated for their purported potential in unlocking the secrets of Ireland’s “ancient” past. At the publication of the first volume in the series in 1865, European Celticists celebrated the work for its philological value. Yet, early Irish law has held a special place in the popular imagination for what various non-scholarly authors have imagined society under these laws to have been. Tying in with the idea of a golden age, this frequently includes an egalitarian society with little gender disparity and, as such, means that the laws were imagined to provide an alternative justice which was denied through official channels.

This lecture will focus on the afterlife of medieval Irish law by discussing the genesis and production of Ancient Laws and Institutes of Ireland and how this publication made the legal corpus more accessible for further use. It will begin with an overview of the medieval corpus before turning to previous attempts to translate the laws. The mid-nineteenth century will be discussed and will be set in the context of the pan-European phenomenon of medieval legal translations from around the same time period. It will then look at the project itself and the various problems which led to its long duration. The remainder of the presentation will examine how the publication and translation of the laws led to discussions about their contents and potential for use. This included Nationalist views about a potential law code for an imagined future independent Ireland; a court case where early Irish law was invoked in the 1930s and 1940s; and a series of articles on early Irish land law in a Norwegian newspaper in the 1880s.

Ciaran McDonough is a Marie Skłodowska Curie Fellow in the Institute of History at the University of Iceland, where she runs her project Medieval Irish and Medieval Icelandic Texts in Nineteenth-Century Translation. She was awarded a PhD by the University of Galway in 2017 for a thesis on nineteenth-century Irish antiquarian research. Her research focuses on antiquarian research and scholarly networks in nineteenth-century Europe.

Fyrirlesturinn verður haldinn á ensku og er öllum opinn. / The talk will be delivered in English and is open to all.