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St Brigit of Kildare’s 1500th anniversary

and the construction of a medieval female national saint in the 21st century

 

 

Lecture by

Dr Niamh Wycherley

Thursday January 30 2025

at

8pm

in

Clonakilty GAA Club, Ahamilla

 

Entry: €5 on the door

 

In this talk Dr Niamh Wycherley sifts through the evidence for the real woman behind the powerful images of the saint, the goddess, and the feminist icon, Brigit. She traces the life of the founder of the great Church of Kildare, explores the contexts in which the earliest stories about her were written, and the long-lasting legacy of arguably the most famous woman in Irish history. 

 

Dr Niamh Wycherley is a medieval historian in the Departments of History and Early Irish in Maynooth University and specialises in the history of early Irish Church. She hosts The Medieval Irish History Podcast. She is Chair of the Royal Irish Academy's Young Academy Ireland. She won the NUI Publication Prize in History in 2017 for her first book, The Cult of Relics in Early Medieval Ireland. She is the Principal Investigator of the 4-year Research Ireland Pathway project 'Power and Patronage in Medieval Ireland: Clonard from the sixth to twelfth centuries'. She previously held IRC and NUI postdoctoral fellowships in UCD Dublin and NUI Galway. She contributes regularly to RTÉ Brainstorm and television programmes such as the RTÉ 1 documentaries Finding Brigid (with Siobhán McSweeney) and Blindboy: The Land of Slaves and Scholars.