IMC 2025: Sessions

This session will present some findings of a major research project, funded by Research Ireland, ‘Power and Patronage in medieval Ireland: Clonard from the sixth to twelfth centuries’. This project entails a detailed case study of a medieval Irish institution of strategic importance, the Church of Clonard in Co. Meath, which allows for an articulation of new paradigms of power in medieval Ireland. These are revealed through the entanglements of ecclesiastical and royal elites, and external actors, during a time of radical political change. This speaks to wider questions of identity in Ireland – community identity, dynastic affiliations, religious identity, and the performance of gender – which interacted in complex and shifting ways in this period. For this session the papers will focus on the considerable scholastic reputation of Clonard. Known as Ana Hérenn ‘The wealth of Ireland’, Clonard was renowned throughout the medieval period as one of the largest and most influential schools and centres for learning in Ireland. Clonard is arguably the most under published and under studied major institution in all of Ireland and Britain. This session aims to correct this scholarly oversight and extend and advance our knowledge of the multiple worlds of learning in medieval Ireland.