27th Annual Sir John T. Gilbert Commemorative Lecture
Professor Jane Ohlmeyer, PI of the VOICES ERC project, was delighted to deliver the 27th Annual Sir John T. Gilbert Commemorative Lecture entitled ‘The lived experiences of women in early modern Dublin’ at Dublin City Library and Archive on 29th May 2024.
After an introduction by Dublin City Librarian Mairead Owens, Professor Ohlmeyer’s lecture focussed on seventeenth-century Dublin, and presented some of the initial findings of the VOICES project.
Drawing on the remarkable body of digital and other historical data, the lecture asked two questions:
First, what role did Dublin women play in a society undergoing profound economic, political and cultural transformation? What is clear is that women played a central and diverse role in daily life and especially the operation of the economy at all levels, and thanks to kin, marital, and fosterage links, were the social glue that held families and communities together. Despite legal restrictions and patriarchal norms, the story of land and property was also a story of women’s lives.
Second, what were the experiences of Dublin women of recurring social upheaval, bloody civil war and extreme trauma? The Irish conflict (1641-52), with an estimated population loss of over 20%, was on a par with the destruction experienced by Bohemia during the Thirty Years War. There is no comprehensive study of mortality, nor of the dislocation and extreme violence women experienced as non-combatants and as victims of warfare during the wars of the 1640s and the 1690s. Yet the evidence suggests that, in addition to being victims of violence, Dublin women played proactive roles in the conflict adapting to extreme circumstances in order to survive.
John Thomas Gilbert (1829-1898) can be considered one of the most important nineteenth-century collectors of books and manuscripts relating to Irish history. His fifty years of focused collecting resulted in one of the finest Irish historical libraries of the period. After his death, Dublin Corporation purchased his library for the citizens of Dublin and the c.9,000 items are now housed in Dublin City Library and Archive on Pearse Street. In 1998, to mark the centenary of John T. Gilbert’s death, Dublin City Council established an annual commemorative lecture series. Now in its 27th year, the lecture series brings new research on Dublin’s history to the public sphere and serves to celebrate the life and work of Gilbert, the man who contributed so much to Dublin’s history.