Ireland’s first school of medicine

Prior to the eighteenth century Ireland’s physicians had trained in Europe—in France, Belgium, Italy, Holland or England. When medicine became well established in Scotland, many Irish medical students, especially those from Ulster, went there. Leiden The teaching of medicine in seventeenth-century Europe had followed developments in science, and the University of Leiden in Holland had … Read more

The past as a bucket of ashes? CIRCLE:a Calendar of IRish Chancery LEtters, c. 1244-1509

‘I tell you the past is a bucket of ashes’, wrote the American poet Carl Sandberg. For Irish historians this line rings true quite literally. The explosion that ripped through the Public Record Office of Ireland at the Four Courts, Dublin, on 30 June 1922 destroyed much of Ireland’s documentary heritage dating back to the … Read more

Three editors over four decades!

The current phase of the CIRCLE project began in 2008 with funding from the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences. But in fact the Irish Chancery Project was originally the brainchild of Jocelyn Otway-Ruthven, the formidable Lecky Professor of History at Trinity between 1951 and 1980. Work on the reconstruction first got … Read more