This topic suggested itself while I was studying Irish antiquarianism during the Enlightenment. I was investigating the Royal Irish Academy and the scholarly and political élite who were central to its establishment in 1785 as the national body for the promotion of ‘science, polite literature and antiquities’. I was looking at the scholarly activities of … Read more
In 1876 the Academy elected its second Irish honorary female member—the archaeologist Margaret Stokes, sister of the philologist Whitley Stokes MRIA. Stokes was the first woman honorary member to contribute papers to RIA meetings and subsequently to the Academy’s Transactions. She was not, however, the first woman to be published by the Academy—that honour fell … Read more
In common with the majority of such societies, it took the RIA over 150 years to allow women into its membership on the same terms as men, but it was prepared from early on to confer honorary membership on a small number of women (five in total between 1791 and 1876). The first was Princess … Read more
Sometime in the mid-1820s tenants on the Mahon estate at Ahascragh in north County Galway wrote to their landlord, begging him not to evict them: ‘Pray pity your poor people who always did and always will pay their rents well, better drown us than turn us off, for there is no place for us anywhere. … Read more
Landed estate papers allow us to examine the lives of ordinary rural people in times of economic turmoil, and rentals, in particular, enable us to analyse the struggles of those on the margins of society, endeavouring to pay their rent and desperately trying to hold on to the small patches of potato ground on which … Read more