Gaelic literati were an elite and influential group in the social hierarchy of Irish lordships and overlordships c. 1300–1600. From their borderland estates, they served Gaelic and Old English ruling families in the arts of history, law, medicine, and poetry. They farmed, kept guest-houses, and conducted schools. As political actors, they were involved in the assemblies of chiefs and in memorializing dynastic histories in the landscape. Using theories of extra-social space and historical landscape as cultural practice and an instrument of power, this book pioneers a framework for identifying and interpreting the settings and built heritages of learned kindred estates. It shows that a more textured definition of what this class represented can be achieved through an archaeology of the buildings and monuments they used and an appreciation of where their estates were situated in the political map. The concept of borderscape is adopted as the essential container of the practices of literati and other tangible expressions of the political power of ruling families. Mediated by case studies of the landscapes of their estates, their dwellings, and schools, the methodology is predominantly field based, using archaeological investigation, topographic and spatial analyses, and visual thinking. It draws on historical and literary texts, place names, and lore, to reference named people to places. More widely, this study contributes a much-needed landscape perspective to the study of autochthonous intellectual culture and the exercise of power by ruling families in northern European societies 1300–1600.

Elizabeth FitzPatrick is an independent researcher and writer in historical landscape studies. She held a chair in archaeology at NUI Galway (2013-21), has been a panel member of the European Research Council (2020-21), a director of the Discovery Programme (2015-20), and archaeological editor of Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy (2007-15). She is the author of Royal Inauguration in Gaelic Ireland 1200-1600: a cultural landscape study (2004), and co-editor of Becoming and belonging in Ireland, AD c. 1200-1600: essays in identity and cultural practice (2018), and Gaelic Ireland 1250-1650: land, lordship and settlement (2001).

Informations pratiques :

Elizabeth FitzPatrick, Landscapes of the Learned. Placing Gaelic Literati in Irish Lordships 1300-1600, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2023 ; 1 vol., 384 p. (Medieval History and Archaeology). ISBN : 978-0192855749. Prix : GBP 83,00.

Source : Oxford University Press