Life and Death, War and Peace, c.1550-c.1700 Voices of Women in Early Modern Ireland

Introduction

VOICES aims to recover the voices and interrogate lived experiences of women in early modern Ireland. Ireland formed part of the British, European, and Atlantic world, and women there responded to similar sets of transformative processes as other early modern women - proto-globalisation, state formation, confessionalisation, warfare, commercialisation, environmental change, and so on – which facilitates interrogation that is comparative, connected, and entangled.

Research Questions

Two ambitious research questions underpin this pioneering project which focuses on Ireland as a case study:

1. What role did women play in a society undergoing profound economic, political, and cultural transformation?
2. What were their experiences of recurring social upheaval, bloody civil war, and extreme trauma, especially sexual violence, and how have these been politicised?

Methodology

Our novel approach derives in large part from the interrogation of previously inaccessible historical data, now available digitally. This windfall is exceptional, but the resulting data is unstructured. Innovative technologies transform this unstructured data into knowledge that can be interrogated and visualised.

Objectives

VOICES will then transform the field of history by allowing us to:

• Recover the marginalised voices, lifecycles, and identities of women in Ireland and assess their contribution to the household, regional, and national economies; and relationship to the land (WPs1, 2).
• Situate the experiences of women in the broader analytical framework of Europe, Britain, and the Atlantic world (WPs1-4).
• Lay the foundations for further future scholarship on the family, gender, identity, memory, emotion, and trauma in the early modern period (WPs1-4).
• Produce ontologies that outline key concepts and entities that relate to women and violence that can be reproduced across time and place, which makes VOICES the exemplar of the new and longstanding research questions now answerable by digitisation and associated methodologies (WP0).