Princeton University’s Fund for Irish Studies continues its 2022-2023 series with a lecture by University of Glasgow scholar Dr. Geraldine Parsons, “The Quiet Girls of Early Ireland: Women in Medieval Irish Literature.” The lecture will take place Friday, February 3 at 4:30 p.m. at the James Stewart Film Theater at 185 Nassau Street. Visiting Leonard L. Milberg ’53 Professor in Irish Letters and Chair of the Fund for Irish Studies Fintan O’Toole provides an introduction. The event is free and open to the public; no tickets are required. The theater is an accessible venue, and guests in need of access accommodations are invited to contact the Lewis Center at LewisCenter@princeton.edu at least one week prior to the event date.
Parson notes that Finn Cycle, or fiannaíocht, literature was the most enduringly popular branch of Irish-language literature from the early Middle Ages until recent times. It prioritizes the exploration of male perspectives and experiences: its tales and poems present two different timelines united by the prominence of men. One is the hyper-masculine warrior culture of ancient Ireland; the other is populated by the male ecclesiastics, warriors and kings of Christian Ireland’s medieval Golden Age. The afterlives of these texts also suggest an enduring appeal among audiences typically gendered male: the oldest surviving manuscript to contain only this corpus of work was commissioned in the 1620s, by an Irish captain in the Spanish army, and written by male scribes, explains Parsons. An association between this literature and Irish military culture, as well as the tradition of soldiery among Scottish Highlanders, continues today. This talk will seek to complicate the gender history of the Finn Cycle, by recovering women’s roles in its production and in the narratives themselves.
Dr. Geraldine Parsons. Photo courtesy Dr. Geraldine Parsons
Parsons is Senior Lecturer in Celtic and Gaelic and Head of Subject at the University of Glasgow, Scotland. Her research focuses on the reception of medieval Irish literature in modern Ireland and 18th-century Scottish Gaelic reflexes of the fíanaigecht tradition, with a particular interest in the material concerning the legendary hero Finn mac Cumaill. Her recent publications include The Gaelic Finn Tradition II (editors S.J. Arbuthnot, G. Parsons & S. Ní Mhurchú, Four Courts, 2022); the article “Ancient Ireland” in The Oxford Handbook of W.B. Yeats (editors L. Arrington and M. Campbell, Oxford University Press, 2023); and an article co-authored with M. Mac Craith, “Reformation, Conquest and Exile 1534–1611 | An Reifirméisean, an Concas Eilíseach agus Deoraíocht thar lear 1534–1611” in Bone and Marrow/Cnámh agus Smior: An Anthology of Irish Poetry from Medieval to Modern (editors B. Ó Conchubhair and S. Fisher, Wake Forest University Press, 2022). Parsons has held visiting fellowships and professorships at Balliol College, the University of Connecticut, and Oxford University. She is the recipient of a 2022-23 British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship.
O’Toole’s books on politics include the recent best sellers We Don’t Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Modern Ireland and Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain. His books on theater include works on William Shakespeare, George Bernard Shaw, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, and Thomas Murphy. He regularly contributes to The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, Granta, The Guardian, The Observer, and other international publications. In 2011, The Observer named O’Toole one of “Britain’s top 300 intellectuals.” He has received the A.T. Cross Award for Supreme Contribution to Irish Journalism, the Millennium Social Inclusion Award, Journalist of the Year in 2010, the Orwell Prize, and the European Press Prize. O’Toole’s History of Ireland in 100 Objects, which covers 100 highly charged artifacts from the last 10,000 years, is currently the basis for Ireland’s postage stamps. He has recently been appointed official biographer of Nobel Prize-winning poet Seamus Heaney.
The Fund for Irish Studies is chaired this year by O’Toole and affords all Princeton students, and the community at large, a wider and deeper sense of the languages, literatures, drama, visual arts, history, and economics not only of Ireland but of “Ireland in the world.” The lecture series is co-produced by the Lewis Center for the Arts.
Information about the Fund for Irish Studies lecture series events can be found at fis.princeton.edu. Additional events being scheduled for the spring semester include:
- A screening of the documentary film Lyra and discussion with director Alison Millar
- Mary Burke (University of Connecticut) lectures on “Race, Politics and Irish America: A Gothic History”
- Fintan O’Toole (Princeton University) delivers the Robert Fagles Memorial Lecture
- Elizabeth Boyle (University of Maynooth) lectures on “Fierce Appetites: Lessons from My Year of Untamed Thinking”
The Fund for Irish Studies is generously sponsored by the Durkin Family Trust and the James J. Kerrigan Jr. ’45 and Margaret M. Kerrigan Fund for Irish Studies.
Visit the Lewis Center website to learn more about the more than 100 public performances, exhibitions, readings, screenings, concerts, lectures, and special events, most of them free, presented each year by the Lewis Center for the Arts.
