Dr Sparky Booker

Assistant Professor in Medieval Irish History

Sparky Booker is a historian of law, culture, women and society in late medieval Ireland. Before she took up her post as Assistant Professor in Medieval Irish History in 2025, she was an Assistant Professor at Dublin City University and Queen’s University Belfast.

Sparky has published on many aspects of late medieval Irish history and is the author of Cultural Exchange and Identity in Late Medieval Ireland: the English and Irish of the Four obedient shires (2018), published by Cambridge University Press in their ‘Studies in Medieval Life and Thought’ series. This monograph was awarded the James S. Donnelly Prize and Donald Murphy Prize from the American Conference for Irish Studies in 2019.

Her interests include women’s lives, status and legal experiences in medieval Ireland, Irish migration and the experiences of the Irish in the English colony in Ireland, the history of Dublin and of the Pale, and legal history, particularly histories of sumptuary law and of the legal remit of the Irish parliament. She has served as co-editor of the Irish Studies journal Studia Hibernica and editor of Tales of Medieval Dublin (2014). Sparky is on the committee of the Friends of Medieval Dublin and the Irish Legal History Society as well as the editorial board of the Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy.

Publications

Books

• Cultural Exchange and Identity in late medieval Ireland: the English and Irish of the Four Obedient Shires, Studies in Medieval Life and Thought Series (Cambridge, 2018), 298pp.
  *Winner of the James S. Donnelly and Donald Murphy Prizes from the American Conference for Irish Studies
• Tales of Medieval Dublin, ed. with Cherie N. Peters (Dublin, 2014), 202pp.

Articles

• ‘Women and legal history: the case of late medieval English Ireland and the challenges of studying ‘women’’, Irish Historical Studies, 46:170 (2022), pp 224-243.
• With Matthew F. Stevens, ‘Irishtowns’ and ‘Welsh Streets’: ethnic enclaves within the towns of colonial Ireland and Wales in a northern-European colonial context in Stevens and Roman Czaja (eds), Proceedings of the British Academy, 224: The Social and Political Order of Urban Communities on European Peripheries from the Twelfth to Sixteenth Centuries (Oxford, 2022), pp 46-72.
• ‘‘Moustaches, mantles and saffron shirts: what motivated sumptuary law in medieval English Ireland?’, Speculum: Journal of the Medieval Academy of America, 96:3 (2021), pp 1-45.
• ‘Irish clergy and the diocesan church in the ‘four obedient shires’ of Ireland, 1399-1534’, Irish Historical Studies, 154 (2014), pp 179-209.
• ‘Intermarriage in fifteenth-century Ireland: the English and Irish in the ‘four obedient shires’, Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, 113c (2013), pp 219-250.

Chapters

• ‘Violence and theft in the private petitions to the Irish parliament’ in Sparky Booker and Kevin Costello (eds), A Sense of place: studies in Irish and British legal history in memory of W.N. Osborough (Dublin, Forthcoming 2025).
• ‘Christmas and the Irish’ in Salvador Ryan (ed.), Christmas and the Irish (Dublin, 2023), pp
• ‘Widowhood and attainder in medieval Ireland: the case of Margaret Nugent’ in Deborah Youngs and Teresa Phipps (eds), Litigating women: gender and justice in Europe, c.1300-c.1800 (Abingdon, 2022), pp 81-98.
• ‘Marriage litigation in Medieval Ireland’ in Salvador Ryan (ed.), Marriage and the Irish (Dublin, 2019), pp 38-40.
• With Roman Bleier, et al., ‘Writing history in the digital age: the Battle of Clontarf goes online’ in Seán Duffy (ed.), Medieval Dublin XVI: Proceedings of Clontarf 1014-2014 (Dublin, 2017), pp 307-24.
• ‘The Geraldines and the Irish: intermarriage, ecclesiastical patronage and status’ in Peter Crooks and Seán Duffy (eds), The Geraldines and medieval Ireland: the making of a myth (Dublin, 2016), pp 292-324.
• ‘The Knight’s tale’ in Sparky Booker and Cherie N. Peters (eds), Tales of Medieval Dublin (Dublin, 2014), pp 135-148.
• ‘Gaelicisation and cultural exchange in late medieval Dublin’ in Seán Duffy (ed.) Medieval Dublin X (Dublin, 2010), pp 289-98.
• ‘Ashamed of their very English names?: Identity and the use of Irish names by the English of late medieval Ireland’ in Gabriela Signori and Christof Rolker (eds), Umstrittene Zugehörigkeit(en). Spätmittelalterliche Praktiken der Namengebung im europäischen Vergleich (Konstanz, 2010), pp 131-48.

Selected Electronic Publications

• ‘The Battle of Clontarf’ website, with Roman Bleier et al. (dh.tcd.ie/clontarf, 2014).

Book Reviews

• ‘The Making of Medieval Derry’, by Ciarán Devlin (Dublin, 2018) in History Ireland, 27:3 (May, 2019).
• ‘Agriculture and Settlement in Ireland, eds Margaret Murphy and Matthew Stout; Space and settlement in medieval Ireland, eds Vicky McAlister and Terry Barry and Soldiers of Christ, eds Martin Browne OSB and Colmán Ó Clabaigh OSB, English Historical Review (March, 2019).
• ‘Gerald of Wales: New Perspectives on a medieval writer and critic, ed. Georgia Henley and A. Joseph McMullen’, Forum for Medieval and Renaissance Studies Ireland (2019).
• ‘William Marshal and Ireland, eds John Bradley, Cóilin Ó Drisceoil and Michael Potterton’, Journal of British Studies, 57:1 (2018).
• ‘Anglo-Norman Parks in medieval Ireland by Fiona Beglane’, Studia Hibernica, 42(2016).
• ‘Medieval Dublin XIV’, ed. Seán Duffy’, Studia Hibernica, 41 (2015).
• ‘Women, Agency and the Law, 1300-1700, eds Bronach Kane and Fiona Williamson’, Institute of Historical Research Reviews in History (2015).
• ‘Crisis and Survival in Late Medieval Ireland: County Louth and its neighbours, 1330-1450 by Brendan Smith’, Economic History Review, 67:4 (2014).
• ‘The Battle of Clontarf: Good Friday 1014 by Darren McGettigan’, Studia Hibernica, 39 (2013).

Contact Details

Department of History
Trinity College
Dublin 2.
sparky.booker