Hello!
This site was created in October 2012, to advertise a gathering I organised at the University College Dublin of scholars who are interested in penance, penitential texts and pastoral care in early medieval Ireland. It was a full day of seminars which promoted very lively discussions and interaction of scholars interested in these topics, see programme. It was very well attended and the audience posed very interesting questions and comments. Since that event we have been organising other scholarly gatherings, see our events.
This took place while I was a doctoral candidate, working on Irish penitential texts and other relevant legal documents. In October 2014, two years after the symposium took place and this site launched, I was awarded a postdoctoral project as a positive result to these fruitful discussions and collaborative work. After that first postdoctoral experience, by expanding my theoretical and methodological framework and paying closer attention to gender aspects in the corpus, I developed a new research project, this time focused on motherhood, mothering, pregnancy, birth and abortion in the middle ages.
This site is a result and show-case for these three funded research projects. Its purpose is to serve as a space of information about medieval penitential tradition, the institution of penance, and pastoral care in the middle ages as well as other broadly related subjects such as history of christianity, processes of conversion, monasticism, ecclesiastical literature, gender studies and women’s social history.
Here you will find information about my projects and career but primarily information about penitential text. This includes relevant academic events, interesting webpages, lists of editions and commentaries on specific texts, and much more.
Enjoy!
Penance, Penitential Tradition, and Pastoral Care in the Middle Ages 