Excerpta ex Historia Hiberniae – problems of medieval and modern Irish history and culture against the comparative background of Europe

Obligatory:

Good understanding and command of English language

Complementary:

Interest in medieval history of Europe

OR

Interest in Irish history and culture

OR

Interest in Anglophone history and culture

Contact hours with teacher:

- participation in lectures 30 hrs (1 ECTS)

- consultations 2 hrs (optional)

Self-study hours:

- preparation for lectures 8 hrs

- reading literature 20 hrs

Altogether: 60 hrs (2 ECTS) or 30 hrs (1 ECTS)

A student

W1: knows selected issues in universal history (in terms of the five

major historical eras) and knows how to arrange them chronologically and thematically (H1A_W04)

W2: knows and understands basic historical terminology in at least one modern language present in the historical sources (H1A_W02)

W3: knows and understands to an elementary extent the relations and interrelationships between the past and current events and their impact on the awareness and identity of people and societies (H1A_W03 and H1A_W07)

W4: demonstrates knowledge of the comparative history of Europe; knows the links between the history of European integration and current social, economic and political issues (H1A_W05)

W5: knows various sources of information; understands their usefulness in historical research (H1A_W07)

A student

U1: can master and apply basic historical research skills under the guidance of a tutor (H1A_U03)

U2: is able to define and use, orally and in writing, basic historical and related terminology both in research work and in the dissemination of historical knowledge (H1A_U04)

U3: formulates theses and argues using the views of other authors of historical works (H1A_U06)

A student

K1: has an awareness of the value of historical culture, which consists of knowledge of the history of the discipline, testimonies, methods and the historical roots of culture (H1A_K05 and H1A_K06)

K2: recognises and respects differences in viewpoints determined by different cultural background; demonstrates autonomy and independence of thought, while respecting the right of others to display the same qualities; is able to show understanding for the values and attitudes of people in different historical periods and contexts (H1A_K02 and H1A_K06)

K3: understands the necessity of respecting ethical norms in the work of a historian and the popularisation of historical knowledge (H1A_K04)

K4: makes attempts to participate in historical discussions and provide information to those interested in history outside the circle of professionals (H1A_K06)

K5: appreciates the role of the historical sciences and related disciplines for the formation of social ties at local and supra-local levels (H1A_K06)

Expository teaching methods:

- informative (briefing) lecture

- storytelling

- demonstrations and case methods

- display

Engaging teaching methods:

- discussion-based lecture

The topic of this lecture is the history of medieval and modern Ireland. The chronological range is from the early Middle Ages (Christianisation of Ireland) to the mid-19th century (the Great Famine). The lecture will present selected topics of history and culture from the history of Ireland, relatively often taken up in academic and popular science literature, drawing on historical sources and an overview of scholarly discussion and relevant contexts. The history and historiography of Ireland will be investigated against the comparative background of history of other European regions and countries.

The "Excerpta ex Historia Hiberniae" lecture offers a journey through the epochs, processes, and events that have shaped Irish history and culture. Irish history serves as a particularly versatile point of departure for discussing broader historical processes and phenomena relevant to Europe as a whole. Participants will explore the history of the island from the early Middle Ages through to the nineteenth century, including the period of the Great Famine. Particular attention is given to historiographical portrayals of the so-called breakthrough moments and processes, such as conquests, famines, epidemics, uprisings, and migration movements. The lecture presents recent research findings in order to contextualise these events within the wider framework of European history and to equip students with the analytical tools necessary for informed discussion. Rather than treating European modernity as a distant background, the course highlights its role as an active and formative force in shaping Irish society and identity, through processes such as the crises, economic impoverishment, and ethnic and class-based exclusion.

List of topics (I-XV) and dates:

I. 23 Feb. Anglophone Media Portrayals of Ireland and the Irish.

II. 2 Mar. The spread of Christianity vs. Christianisation. Christianisation and early Christian culture in Ireland and beyond.

III. 9 Mar. The Irish and the Vikings – violence, settlement and the story of Brian Boru.

IV. 16 Mar. The Troubles with the Brexit.

V. 23 Mar. Henry II, Thomas Beckett and the Catholicisation of Ireland.

VI. 30 Mar. The Norman conquest 1066, the Anglo-Norman conquest 1169 – historiographical discussions; causes, course and effects.

VII. 13 Apr. Defining a city: the historiographical approaches to urbanisation of medieval Ireland and other frontier regions of Europe

VIII. 20 Apr. Political order of European urban societies and the issue of a revolt.

IX. 27 Apr. Plague, society and economy: the case of Ireland and other cases.

X. 4 May. The Knights Templar and (varied cases of) witch hunt.

XI. 11 May. Colonialism, postcolonialism and the exploration of the New World - Irish case and other cases.

XII. 18 May. The 19th-c. Establishment towards the most vulnerable: organised actions against poverty, disease and corruption, and their contemporary image in culture. A glance at Ireland.

XIII. 25 May. A nation of insurgents – the birth of Irish nationalism against the comparative background.

XIV. 1 Jun. The Great Famine – causes, course and effects.

XV. 8 Jun. From the Troubles to the Celtic Tiger: Social Change in Ireland through Statistical Evidence.

Recommended literature, a selection:

Medieval Ireland: An Encyclopedia, ed. Sean Duffy, New York 2005.

Fintan O’Toole, A History of Ireland in 100 Objects, Dublin 2013.

A new history of Ireland, ed. T.W. Moody, Francis X. Martin, Francis J. Byrne, Oxford 1976.

A new history of Ireland. 2: Medieval Ireland 1169-1534, ed. Art Cosgrove, Oxford 1987.

A new history of Ireland. 3: Early Modern Ireland 1534-1691, ed. T. W. Moody, F. X. Martin, and F. J. Byrne, Oxford 2009.

Donnchadh Ó Corráin, Ireland before the Normans, Dublin 1972.

Annette Jocelyn Otway–Ruthven, A History of Medieval Ireland, London 1980 and later editions.

Richard Britnell, Britain and Ireland 1050–1530, Oxford 2004.

Sean Duffy, Ireland in the Middle Ages, London 1997.

Dublinia: The Story of Medieval Dublin, ed. Howard B. Clarke, Sarah Dent, Ruth Johnston, Dublin 2002.

Joseph Yose, Ralph Kenna, Máirín MacCarron, Pádraig MacCarron, „Network analysis of the Viking Age in Ireland as portrayed in Cogadh Gaedhel re Gallaibh”, Royal Society of Open Science 2018, https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.171024.

The Viking Age - Ireland and the West, ed. John Sheehan, Donnchadh Ó Corráin, Dublin 2010.

Sean Duffy, Brian Boru and the Battle of Clontarf, Dublin 2013.

Jerzy Strzelczyk, Chrystianizacja Irlandii, Poznań 2006.

Jerzy Strzelczyk, Iroszkoci w kulturze średniowiecznej Europy, Warszawa 1987.

Jerzy Strzelczyk, Apostołowie Europy, Poznań 2010.

Peter Heather, The Restoration of Rome, London 2013.

Sean Duffy, „Ireland's Hastings: The Anglo-Norman Conquest of Dublin”, Anglo-Norman Studies 20: Proceedings of the Battle Conference 1997, Woodbridge 1998.

Howard B. Clarke, „1066, 1169, and All That: The Tyranny of Historical Turning Points”, in: European Encounters. Essays in Memory of Albert Lovett, ed. Judith Devlin, H.B. Clarke, Dublin 2003, pp. 11-36.

Stephen Howe, „Questioning the (bad) question: 'Was Ireland a colony?'”, Irish Historical Studies, 36, 142 (2008), pp. 138-152.

Margaret Murphy, Michael Potterton, The Dublin region in the Middle Ages: settlement, land-use and economy, Dublin 2010.

The comparative history of urban origins in non-Roman Europe: Ireland, Wales, Denmark, Germany, Poland and Russia from the 9th to the 13th century, ed. H.B. Clarke, Anngret Simms, Oxford 1985.

Towns on the Edge in Medieval Europe: The Social and Political Order of Peripheral Urban Communities from the Twelfth to Sixteenth Centuries, ed. Matthew F. Stevens, Roman Czaja, Oxford 2022.

Anna Maleszka, Urbanizacja na obrzeżach łacińskiej Europy. Studium komparatystyczne rozwoju miast i krajobrazów miejskich w Irlandii, Prusach i Inflantach w XII-XIV wieku, Toruń 2024.

Howard B. Clarke, „Angliores ipsis Anglis: the place of medieval Dubliners in English history”, in: Surveying Ireland’s Past: Multidisciplinary Essays in Honour of Anngret Simms, ed. Howard B. Clarke, Jacinta Prunty and Mark Hennessy, Dublin 2004, pp. 41-72.

Maria Kelly, A History of Black Death in Ireland, Stroud 2001.

Bruce M.S. Campbell, „Benchmarking medieval economic development: England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland, c.1290”, The Economic History Review, 2008, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-0289.2007.00407.x

Raymond Ruhaak, „Towards an Alternative Black Death Narrative for Ireland: Ecological and Socio-Economic Divides on the Medieval European Frontier”, J. of the North Atlantic, 2019(39):1-16 (2019). https://doi.org/10.3721/037.006.3901

Spyrou, M.A., Musralina, L., Gnecchi Ruscone, G.A. et al., „The source of the Black Death in fourteenth-century central Eurasia”, Nature 606, 718–724 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-022-04800-3

Piotr Guzowski, „Did the Black Death reach the Kingdom of Poland in the middle of the 14th century?”, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2111.02714.

Maeve Brigid Callan, The Templars, the Witch, and the Wild Irish. Vengeance and Heresy in Medieval Ireland, Ithaca 2015.

Helen Nicholson, „The trial of the Templars in Britain and Ireland”, in: The Templars: The Rise, Fall, and Legacy of a Military Religious Order, ed. Jochen Burgtorf, Shlomo Lotan, Enric Mallorquí i Ruscarella, London 2021, pp. 209-233.

Robin Frame, Ireland and Britain, 1170-1450, London 1998.

Robin Frame, Plantagenet Ireland, Dublin 2022.

Jackson W. Armstrong, Peter Crooks, Andrea Ruddick, Using Concepts in Medieval History: Perspectives on Britain and Ireland, 1100-1500, Basingstoke 2022.

Ní Mhaonaigh, Máire, „Medieval Irish battle narratives and the construction of the past”, in: Writing battles. New perspectives on warfare and memory in medieval Europe, ed. Elizabeth A. Rowe, Máire Ní Mhaonaigh, Rory Naismith, London 2020, pp. 131-146.

Stephen Hewer, Beyond exclusion: Intersections of ethnicity, sex, and society under English law in medieval Ireland, Turnhout 2021.

Senia Paseta, Modern Ireland: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford 2003.

Damien Duffy, Aristocratic women in Ireland, 1450-1660: the Ormond family, power and politics, Martlesham 2021.

Anthony Brundage, „The English Poor Law of 1834 and the Cohesion of Agricultural Society”, Agricultural History, Jul., 1974, Vol. 48, No. 3, pp. 405-417.

Mark Blaug, „The Myth of the Old Poor Law and the Making of the New”, The Journal of Economic History, Vol. 23, Issue 2, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0022050700103808.

Karel Williams, From Pauperism to Poverty, London 2018.

Sisters, ed. Siobhán Fitzpatrick, Mary O’Dowd, Dublin 2022.

Jacinta Prunty, Our Lady of Charity in Ireland: The Monasteries, Magdalen Asylums, and Reformatory Schools, 1853-1973, Dublin 2017.

Peter Gray, The Making of the Irish Poor Law, 1815–43, Manchester 2009.

W.E. Vaughan, A.J. Fitzpatrick, Irish Historical Statistics: Population 1821-1971, Dublin 1978.

Fintan O'Toole, „What Made the Irish Famine So Deadly”, The New Yorker, March 10, 2025.

Tim Pat Coogan, The Famine Plot: England’s Role in Ireland’s Greatest Tragedy, London 2013.

Jerry Mulvihill, The Truth Behind the Irish Famine, 2021.

John Crowley, Atlas of the Great Irish Famine, New York 2012.

Miho Tanaka, „‘Nation’ Consciousnesses in Medieval Ireland”, in: Journal of International Economic Studies, 24, 2010, pp. 3-16.

Diane Negra, The Irish in Us: Irishness, Performativity, and Popular Culture, 2006.

John Maguire, Why Hollywood gets the Irish so wrong, 11 Dec 2020, https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20201210-why-hollywood-gets-the-irish-so-wrong

Assessment methods:

Non-graded credit:

- attendance (14/15);

- if attendance falls below 14 classes, the student is required to complete a test, covering the material from the lectures they missed.

Graded credit:

- attendance (14/15) accounts for up to 60% of a grade (satisfactory);

- The remaining 40% of the grade is earned by answering questions from the lectures on a test.

Assessment criteria:

fail- <60% (non-graded credit and graded credit, FAIL / 2)

pass- =60% and >60% (non-graded credit, PASS)

satisfactory- 60% (graded credit, 3)

satisfactory plus- >60%-70% (graded credit, 3.5)

good – 71-79% (graded credit, 4)

good plus- 80-85% (graded credit, 4.5)

very good- >85% (graded credit, 5)

not applicable