"The Geraldines and Medieval Ireland: the Making of a Myth": Inaugural Medieval Ireland Symposium
Edmund Burke Theatre, Trinity College
13 September 2013
Welcome everybody, to the Edmund Burke theatre for this most exciting talk on the ‘Great Earl’ of Kildare. This is the keynote address of the inaugural Medieval Ireland symposium, which got under way today and continues tomorrow. Many of you were present for earlier papers; others, not attending the symposium, have come to hear Professor Ellis, whose fame precedes him.
The Trinity ‘Medieval Ireland’ Symposium is a new biennial international conference, promoting accessible medieval scholarship. We welcome here today medieval historians from the universities of Durham, Bangor, Bristol and Hull, and from all round Ireland.
The proceedings of the symposia are to be published in a new series aimed at making cutting-edge historical scholarship accessible to everyone interested in researching, teaching, or learning about Ireland in the Middle Ages. The papers at this symposium are written to appeal to specialists and non-specialists alike. They will help promote a wider public understanding and enjoyment of medieval Irish history, as well as helping to set the agenda and research trajectory for Irish medievalism.
As someone who is certainly not a specialist in medieval history, I welcome this symposium addressing as it does a real public appetite for history, and particularly for medieval history. In Ireland, the presence of history is always felt very immediately. We are currently in the middle of a debate on the ‘decade of commemorations’, and are airing our views on the 1913 lockout. Soon we will move onto 1916 and the War of Independence.
Medieval history is less aired because it is more remote, but, if anything, it exerts a greater hold on the imagination. There is a reason for the vogue in television programmes on the War of the Roses and the Tudor period - it’s because of the danger and excitement of those times, the pageantry and the strong characters, the religion and the sexual politics. Medieval and Renaissance history is history which engages, terrifies, and ignites, and the organisers of this symposium, in choosing the Great Earl and the Geraldines have plunged us into a particularly exciting period.
I congratulate Sean Duffy and Peter Crooks from our School of Histories and Humanities, for establishing the symposium, the latest in a series of impressive initiatives by our medieval historians to pioneer and showcase research.
It was my pleasure to launch last year the medieval Irish Chancery Letters, an invaluable online resource which many of you know and consult. This remarkable project involved restoring the Chancery Letters that had been destroyed during the Civil War. The project was four decades in the making and involved important input from generations of historians, including some who are giving papers here today and tomorrow: Katharine Simms, Peter Crooks, and Robin Frame from the University of Durham.
A few days ago Trinity received the good news that we had, in the words of the Irish Independent, “defied the austerity odds” to rise six places in the world university rankings, from 67th to 61st place.
Our medieval historians, through their formidable research and their willingness to place this research at the service of students and the public, have helped us ‘defy the austerity odds’, and are making Trinity one of the leading engines for the study of medieval Ireland anywhere in the world.
On this subject, I’d like to announce a new public lectures series which will start next year. James Lydon was Lecky Professor of History here in Trinity from 1980 to 1993. Following his death, a few months ago, on 25th June, it has been decided to mark his contribution to the College and to medieval studies with a biennial lecture series.
The James Lydon Lectures in Medieval History and Culture will be a series of four public lectures given by a noted international academic; the lectures will be published as a monograph by a major academic press.
The inaugural Lydon Lecturer is the emeritus professor of Medieval history at the London School of Economics. John Gillingham is an historian of extraordinary range, best known as author of The Angevin Empire and for his biography of Richard ‘The Lionheart’. The title of his Lydon Lectures is ‘War, enslavement and chivalry in European history’, and they will kick off October next year. I hope many of you can attend.
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‘War, enslavement and chivalry’ will, I suspect, also be touched on in this evening’s talk on the ‘Great Earl’ of Kildare. I confess I did not know too much about the ‘Great Earl’ until this symposium, but I am fast becoming entranced by his story, as I think, must anyone by such a charismatic and intriguing figure.
I have learned, from Sean Duffy, that the Geraldines gave Ireland not only two noble houses - the Earls of Desmond and Kildare - but a host of later historical personalities, including Garret FitzGerald and John F. Kennedy. The ‘F’ in ‘JFK’ tells us that he was, on his mother’s side, an Irish Geraldine.
And it turns out I have a particular interest: the Geraldines were among the first of the Welsh Normans to arrive in Ireland in 1169 - when they were granted the town of Wexford by Dermot MacMurrough - but they were not thefirst. They were preceded by two years by the Prendergasts, a family of Flemish origin who had, like the Geraldines, made South Wales their home. Over the generations, the Prendergasts and Geraldines frequently intermarried and apparently the Prendergasts can in a sense be considered part of the wider Geraldine family – which comes as news to me!
Trinity had of course no part to play in the ‘Great Earl’s’ story, since the college was not then founded, but when it comes to the ‘making of the Geraldine myth’, the college - or at least its students - has played a key role.
Today’s symposium took place in the Thomas Davis theatre, named for the poet and Trinity student who was a major myth-maker and wrote the lines: “Ye Geraldines! Ye Geraldines! - How royally ye reigned / O’er Desmond broad and Kildare rich, and English arts disdained”. I am not sure that ‘disdained’ is the mot juste here – Professor Ellis will tell us.
And James Clarence Mangan was employed by the library in Trinity in the 1840s, in what can only be described as an act of charity since the alcoholic and destitute Mangan was not really in a condition to work. He wrote – or loosely translated - ‘A Lamentation for the Death of Sir Maurice Fitzgerald’ about another Geraldine, who died Flanders in 1642. It describes an unearthly wail which, on the death of Sir Maurice, rose up through Munster - from Fermoy to Inchiquin to Dunanore:
“Not for base-born higgling Saxon trucksters
Ring laments like those by shore and sea!
Not for churls with souls like hucksters
Waileth our Banshee!”
Between the Prendergast dimension and the Trinity myth-making, I am fast developing a great interest in the Earl and in the Geraldines. It’s my pleasure now to call on our keynote speaker, Professor Steven Ellis, to bring us through the life and career of the ‘all but king of Ireland’.
Professor Ellis has enjoyed a glittering academic career and is now head of the School of Humanities in University College Galway. He is a foremost historian of Tudor Ireland, and a noted controversialist. After the publication of his seminal Ireland in the Age of the Tudors in 1998, an American reviewer called the book “remarkable and welcome” and noted “Ellis’s willingness to challenge existing orthodoxies, even those hallowed by time, repetition, and emotion. In Ireland his views sometimes put him in the middle of a sort of historical no man's land, raked by machine gun fire from several pillboxes. This hostility is not surprising, since many of his views strike at the heart of other cherished viewpoints.”
This view, as well as being so appreciative of Professor Ellis, is also testament to the importance of history in Ireland, the debate it can inspire, the passions it can evoke. Debate and passion are indeed why we are gathered here this evening to hear this great historian of Tudor times – or rather of Geraldine times.
Ladies and Gentlemen, Professor Steven Ellis.
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