New from the Research Blog: "Notaries in Medieval and Early Modern Ireland"

In June of 2023, I arranged to meet my friend and fellow historian Caoimhe Whelan for a short breakfast during one of my rare trips to Ireland. I had given the rest of the day over to research, a concession of one day in what was supposed to be a family holiday. At breakfast, Caoimhe introduced me to Stuart Kinsella, Christ Church Cathedral’s Research Advisor; he was chasing down the scribes and notaries of the Cathedral’s later medieval manuscripts, and had run across a few pages at the back of my dissertation – an appendix cataloguing all of the notaries I had found in the process of investigating the life and career of Anglo-Irish author and notary James Yonge. In introducing me to Stuart, Caoimhe inadvertently cancelled my vacation. Breakfast was consumed. We talked. We ordered coffee. Stuart got out his carefully compiled list of notaries. We talked some more. Soon we were ordering lunch. We compared images, debated the merits of early 20th-century drawings of documents lost in a catastrophic 1922 fire a half mile from where we sat, and began making plans. By the end of the morning, we had explored several possibilities for a project far wider than my study of James Yonge or Stuart’s study of Christ Church scribes and notaries. Every spare moment I could get for the rest of my time in Ireland was given over to notaries. (Caoimhe would go on to destroy my summer holidays the following year with a grainy image of a notarial signum taken at Sarah Graham’s lecture at Leeds, but that is a tale for another time)...

This is an excerpt from "Notaries in Medieval and Early Modern Ireland" by Theresa O’Byrne. Read the full story.