Visit to the University of Sheffield

By Dr Daniel Patterson

In March 2025, VOICES PI Professor Jane Ohlmeyer and Research Fellow Dr Daniel Patterson visited
The University of Sheffield to attend a workshop on Women and the courts: New work and
new approaches. The event featured speakers from across the UK and Ireland presenting
exciting new research on women’s history and the evidence of court documents in the early
modern Anglophone world.

A succession of fascinating and innovative papers explored themes including the treatment
of mentally ill women in the English Court of Chancery (Prof Amanda Capern, Hull),
signatures and marks created by ‘illiterate’ or semi-literate women as ‘signs of self-
expression’ (Dr Charmian Mansell, Sheffield), women in the milling industry and the English
Court of Exchequer (Dr Mabel Winter, Oxford), a ‘view from the archival frontline’ and the
effort to identify and catalogue litigants in English Chancery and other courts (Amanda
Bevan, TNA), and the legal personhood of married women in eighteenth-century England
(Emily Ireland, Liverpool).

Jane and Daniel rounded out the day by delivering a joint paper entitled From the ashes:
Recovering Irish women’s lives from Chancery Court records. The paper laid out the unique archival
context of early modern Irish women’s history in the wake of the destruction of archives in 1922. It
went on to outline the digital humanities approach taken across the entire VOICES project, before
engaging in a detailed discussion of our pioneering work with Irish Chancery Pleadings. We were
particularly keen to explore, for a specialist audience, the fascinating parallels and divergences
between English and Irish Chancery Courts in their functions and jurisdictions with particular
reference to cases involving women. This is a major avenue for future research which we are only
beginning to fully understand.
All in all, it was a hugely enjoyable and educational day, with plenty of discussion and exchanges of
views and ideas for advancing the study of early modern women’s history.

The following day, Jane gave a paper at the Sheffield History Research Seminar about the
VOICES project, entitled Hiding in plain sight: Women in early modern Ireland and the
VOICES project.  There was a lively discussion, especially around the importance of creating
technologies that really work for and can be trusted by historians.

The VOICES project is grateful to Prof Phil Withington and the School of History, Philosophy
and Digital Humanities at The University of Sheffield for the invitation to present our work.