Project description
Recovering the forgotten stories of early modern Irish women
The voices and experiences of women in early modern Ireland have remained shrouded in obscurity, despite these women's pivotal role in a society undergoing profound change. As the country grappled with economic, political, and cultural transformations, the stories of the women highlighting their resilience amidst social upheaval and trauma have largely been lost to history. Funded by the European Research Council, the VOICES project will use digital technologies to unearth and amplify the narratives of the non-elite, 'ordinary' women. It will transform previously inaccessible historical data into a vivid tapestry of the women's lives. VOICES aims to bridge the past with the present and lay the foundations for future scholarship on gender, identity, and trauma in the early modern era.
Objective
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.
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?
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. 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)
Fields of science
Programme(s)
- HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC) Main Programme
Topic(s)
Funding Scheme
HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC GrantsHost institution
D02 CX56 DUBLIN 2
Ireland