IMC 2026: Sessions
Session 1339: Right Place, Right Time: Prosopographical Approaches to Medieval Ireland
Wednesday 8 July 2026, 16:30-18:00
| Sponsor: | Normandy and Ireland Settlement Connections (NAISC), National Monuments Service, Ireland |
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| Organiser: | John Marshall, Department of History, Trinity College Dublin |
| Moderator/Chair: | David E. Thornton, Tarih Bölümü, Bilkent Üniversitesi, Ankara |
| Paper 1339-a | Introducing NAISC: A Prosopography of Post-Conquest Ireland (Language: English) Index terms: Charters and Diplomatics, Genealogy and Prosopography, Social History |
| Paper 1339-b | One Valley, Two Nations?: A Prosopographical Approach to Anglo-Irish Interaction in Colonial Ireland (Language: English) Index terms: Charters and Diplomatics, Genealogy and Prosopography, Social History |
| Paper 1339-c | Charters as Census Substitutes: Reconstructing the Population of Medieval Dublin (Language: English) Index terms: Charters and Diplomatics, Genealogy and Prosopography, Social History |
| Abstract | Medieval Ireland has lagged behind other regions in terms of the depth and breadth of large-scale prosopographical and collective biographical studies. NAISC (Normandy and Ireland Settlement Connections) marks the commencement of a major effort to remedy the deficit. Beginning in the late 1160s, waves of Cambro- and Anglo-Norman knights invaded and began to conquer large swathes of Ireland, establishing settlements throughout the country and populating those estates with vast throngs of their tenants from England, Wales and further afield. In a small county like Wexford alone there is a whole host of surnames often traced back to that era—names like Busher, Bolger, Codd, Colfer, Corish, Fortune, Furlong, Hore, Howlin, Jordan, Keating, Lambert, Myler, Prendergast, Redmond, Roche, Siggins, Sinnott, Wadden, Whitty—but professional historical prosopographical research of the subject has been limited, despite the fact that a rich archive of documentary evidence still survives in records originating in medieval Ireland, Britain, and Normandy. This has the potential to enable us to trace these families back to the moment of their arrival in Ireland and beyond that to their transmarine homeland, clarifying and elucidating the networks of interconnectedness between them. The papers presented in this session highlight ongoing lines of investigation by NAISC. |