Dr. Peter Crooks

An all-island and international legacy project for the Decade of Centenaries

On 30 June 1922 the Treasury Room containing Ireland's documentary heritage dating back to the thirteenth century was destroyed in a cataclysmic explosion and fire at the Four Courts. On the centenary of that blaze in 2022, this project will launch a Virtual Record Treasury that reconstructs the nation's archives and its collective memories. In partnership with the National Archives of Ireland, the National Archives of the United Kingdom and other national and international institutions, Beyond 2022 seeks to ensure a lasting and inspirational legacy beyond the current decade of centenaries. The project has obtained major funding for a 24 month project (2017-2019) from Irish Research Council New Horizons Scheme (€219,992.50). The centrepiece of the project is new an online resource - the Virtual Record Treasury - which will provide a digital reconstruction of the Record Treasury of the Public Record Office of Ireland as it existed in 1922, on the eve of the fire. This will become not only an essential platform for academic research but also a public resource with global reach and impact among the Irish at home and abroad. The Virtual Record Treasury will provide: -Data visualizations enabling researchers to explore the treasury of the Public Record Office and its collections -A complete inventory of loss and survival from the 1922 fire. -Digitizations of the surviving originals, transcripts and calendars. -Detailed guides to the significance of those collections from the thirteenth century to the Victorian era. -A vital hub linking replacement material held in archival repositories in Ireland and across the world. http://www.histories-humanities.tcd.ie/research/Beyond-2022/ Seed funding (€6,000) was provided by Trinity's School of Histories and Humanities and the Making Ireland Research Theme

This IRCHSS-funded project seeks to advance our understanding of the 'making of Ireland' between the high Middle Ages and the dawn of the modern era-one of the most formative periods in Ireland's past-by publishing on the web and in print an English calendar of the rolls of the medieval Irish chancery, c. 1216-1509. The chancery was a key organ of English government in medieval Ireland. Access to its records is, however, severely restricted. The original chancery rolls suffered a series of calamities from the 13th century, culminating in 1922 with the destruction of the last 123 original rolls. A Latin calendar produced by the Irish Record Commission (1828) does not compensate for their destruction: it was poorly edited and lacks an adequate critical apparatus. Moreover, it offers no English translations and the text is printed in 'record type', reflecting abbreviations in the original manuscripts. This project will remedy these deficiencies by reconstructing the chancery rolls from transcripts and calendars dating from 14th-19th centuries located in Ireland and England. The outcome will be a web-based English calendar, to be followed by a multi-volume printed edition. This project will revolutionise medieval Irish studies by providing both specialists and the general public with access to an unparalleled source of information. More generally, the project will generate interest from scholars working on administrative history in a Europe-wide context and on the 'Anglicization' of the British Isles in Middle Ages. It will also stimulate exciting comparative work across the medieval-modern divide on the adaptation (or 'creolisation') of metropolitan governing practices and values in a colonial context, and on the processes of state formation and cultural exchange in the British Isles and the early modern Atlantic world.

This project will provide a case study of medieval colonialism in action. It explores political society and political culture in English Ireland (1361-1460). The resulting monograph will make a major contribution to the diachronic study of colonialisms. This research project takes as its subject 'Ireland in the Age of Intervention', so-called because the century between 1361 and 1460 witnessed intensive investment-military and financial-by the English crown in Ireland. The 'interventionist' era opens with the expedition to Ireland of Lionel of Antwerp in 1361, and peters out with the 'Declaration of Parliamentary Independence' in 1460, which has often been interpreted as an expression of 'separatism' on the part of the colonial community. This project uses English Ireland as a case study of medieval colonialism in action-that is colonialism as a process underway as distinct from the initial process of colonization, which in Ireland (as elsewhere) has attracted greater scholarly attention, perhaps because in the early stages of a colonial encounter ('first contact', settlement, and so on) social change is readily apparent, and identities and cultures have yet to inter-bleed and blur. But it is precisely the hybrid nature of colonial society in this later period that makes it so appealing as a subject of research.

This joint initiative between Trinity College Dublin, the University of Aberdeen (Dr Jackson Armstrong) and the University of Oxford (Dr Andrea Ruddick) has received funding from the British Academy/Leverhulme Small Grant Award (2017); the Trinity Long Room Hub Research Incentive Scheme (2015); and the Research Institute for Irish-Scottish Studies, University of Aberdeen (2015). The project addresses itself to a set of meta-historical and methodological questions concerning the use and abuse of concepts in medieval history. It is through concepts that humans seek intellectually to arrange and order the world they experience. Consequently concepts are of fundamental importance to humanistic research, both as an aspect of research methodology and as a subject of historical investigation in their own right. Unfortunately, medievalists - especially late-medieval historians in the Anglophone world - have been slow to reflect on these matters. Indeed, medieval history generally is notable for its suspicion of certain 'master nouns' that have been labelled 'tyrannous constructs' because of their distorting effect on historical interpretations. The aim of this project is not so much to slay the tyrant as to expose the whole problem of conceptual history for discussion, exploring both the perils and the pay-offs of working with concepts. The project has established a network that will convene at a series of workshops held at Trinity College Dublin, the Universities of Aberdeen and Oxford. To focus the intellectual agenda of the working group, the project will concentrate its efforts on the insular world in the period c.1100-c.1500. The first of these meetings, funded by the Long Room Hub Research Incentive Scheme, met in Dublin in May 2016.