29.06.2015
Christ Church Hosts Lecture Series on ‘Women and the Church’
Christ Church Cathedral, Dublin, will host a summer lunchtime lecture series on ‘Women & the Church’. The series starts tomorrow, Tuesday June 30 and continues each Tuesday lunchtime until July 21.
In a time when so much focus is on the church’s relationship with homosexuality, it is easy to forget that women have until very recently been the Cinderellas of the institution. In a series of four lectures, given by four women: a historian, an archaeologist, an art historian and a priest, the series will explore the role of women and the church ranging from the medieval period to the modern day.
Held in the cathedral’s spacious and refurbished music room, the first of the lectures on Tuesday June 30 will be given by Dr Maeve Callan of Simpson College in Indianola, Iowa, who has recently published her book The templars, the witch, and the wild Irish: vengeance and heresy in medieval Ireland (Cornell University Press & Four Courts Press, 2015). Her talk will be entitled ‘Witchcraft, heresy, magic & gender in the fourteenth–century Anglo–Irish colony’.
The second lecture will be given on Tuesday July 7 by Tracy Collins, a professional archaeologist who is a co–director of Aegis Archaeology and who is submitting her Ph.D. on ‘An archaeology of female monasticism in medieval Ireland’ in the Department of Archaeology in University College Cork at the end of the year. Her lecture title will be ‘Nuns in medieval Ireland: the other monasticism’.
Emerging from the medieval period, the third lecture will be given on Tuesday July 14 by Dr Clodagh Tait, who has lectured in University College Dublin, the University of Essex and Mary Immaculate College at the University of Limerick. Her topic will be ‘Motherhood from the pages of seventeenth–century parish registers’.
Lastly, the concluding lecture will be given on Tuesday July 21 by a former member of the cathedral chapter and one of the first women ordained in the Church of Ireland, the Revd Canon Dr Virginia Kennerley, entitled ‘25 years at the altar: Have women priests changed the church?’.
All lectures begin at 1.15 pm in the music room and admission is free. The series has been generously supported by the Friends of Christ Church Cathedral, Dublin, and all are most warmly invited to attend.