Annual Sir John T. Gilbert Commemorative Lecture

Dublin City Library and Archive presented the Annual Sir John T Gilbert Commemorative Lecture, a talk by Professor Jane Ohlmeyer entitled, ‘The lived experiences of women in early modern Dublin’ on 29 May 2024. 

With a focus on seventeenth-century Dublin, this lecture presents some of the initial findings of Jane Ohlmeyer’s European Research Council project – VOICES - on the lived experiences of women in early modern Ireland. Drawing on a remarkable body of digital data, this lecture asks 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 be victims of violence, Dublin women played proactive roles in the conflict adapting to extreme circumstances in order to survive.

Professor Jane Ohlmeyer, MRIA, FBA, FTCD, FRHistS, is Erasmus Smith's Professor of Modern History (1762) at Trinity College Dublin. She was a driving force behind the 1641 Depositions Project and the development of the Trinity Long Room Hub Arts and Humanities Research Institute. In 2023 she received an Advanced ERC for VOICES, a project on the lived experiences of women in early modern Ireland.  She is the author or editor of numerous articles and 11 books.  Her latest Making Ireland: Ireland, Imperialism and the Early Modern World (Oxford, 2023) is based on the 2021 Ford Lectures in Oxford.  In 2023 she was awarded the Royal Irish Academy Gold Medal in the Humanities.

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.