Periodic Reporting for period 3 - CLIC (Classical Influences and Irish Culture)
Période du rapport: 2022-10-01 au 2024-03-31
Through over fifty dissemination talks to both specialist and public audiences, our project team has presented research on the core research objectives associated with the project’s nine themes. Irish language texts, their interaction with classical sources, and their political meanings have been illuminated. The historical context of land confiscations in the early modern period has highlighted the articulation of political upheaval and experiences of migration and exile through classical exempla. The recurrence of the Trojan War as a motif from the medieval period to the present day has been examined to demonstrate the primacy of this narrative in addressing historical conflicts in Ireland. Similarly spanning the early medieval period to the twentieth century, exploration of the various forms of Platonism that have existed in Ireland across its intellectual history has demonstrated the development of a common non-sectarian language shared by Irish figures of diverse interests, political ideals, and religious commitments. Study of the contribution made by women to the dissemination of classical culture in Ireland has developed and expanded beyond the original women identified to include new figures from the eighteenth to twenty-first centuries. Research on neoclassical and classicizing art and architecture in Ireland has uncovered the vital importance of the classical personification of Hibernia as a non-sectarian figure of universal appeal in embodying Ireland. Meanwhile, the global influence of Irish classicism has been spotlighted by research on James Joyce’s Ulysses and its intersection with migration. Publications are starting to appear and continue to be planned in line with the final object of the Description of the Action.
A recent conference on Irish Platonisms, and associated book in preparation, was the first to survey, through interdisciplinary means, the diachronic importance of Platonist thought to a diverse cross-section of Irish culture. A planned conference on Classical Antiquity in Medieval Ireland, and an associated book, will shed light on neglected medieval texts, dating from the tenth to the fifteenth centuries, which rewrite classical literature but remain largely unknown outside very small circles of specialist scholars. A planned conference on Irish Migrations and Classical Antiquity, with a further associated book, represents a ground-breaking intersectionality in bringing together scholars from a wide range on interdisciplinary backgrounds to demonstrate the importance of classical antiquity for the articulation of Irish experiences of migration, with former President of Ireland, Mary McAleese as keynote speaker.