IMC 2024: Sessions

These sessions bring together historians and conservators to consider three sets of surviving medieval documents from Ireland to consider their significance and materiality. Each set of documents speaks to key moments of crisis within the English lordship of Ireland from the mid-fourteenth century to the mid-fifteenth. The papers will reflect on what can be learned from these unique surviving manuscripts with interdisciplinary collaboration.

Archbishop John Swayne of Armagh’s register now at the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland offers an unusual and distinctive vantage point on the problems of Ireland of the fifteenth century. As both his personal register of the council of Constance (1415-18), and of his archepiscopate of Armagh (1418-1439), the register speaks to crisis in church and state. Its ongoing conservation is also raising new questions about archiepiscopal record-keeping practice and materiality. The final paper looks at how the integration of new digital resources will allow historians to work with widely dispersed sources for medieval Irish government and its crises.