Meghan Frazier
fraziema@tcd.ie
Biography
I am from Boston, Massachusetts. I completed a BA in History at Emmanuel College in Boston in 2007. I started my MPhil in Early Modern History at Trinity in 2011. In December 2011, I contributed to a panel presentation on ‘Women and Tavern Culture in Early Modern Europe’ at a joint workshop between Trinity and the Reformation Studies Institute of the University of St Andrews.
Research
‘“and for feare they should fall from it and turne hereticks”: Apostasy and Martyrdom in 1641 Ulster’
My dissertation analyses witness statements taken after the 1641 Irish rebellion to identify contemporary beliefs about apostasy, heresy and conversion. I will investigate how notions of orthodoxy and orthopraxy related to ideas about apostasy in Ulster. Although the 1641 depositions contain much unreliable testimony designed to create public sympathy for the Protestant community in Ireland, they also include valuable accounts of attempted and successful conversions in Ulster.