Towns in medieval Ireland with Dr Michael Potterton

The Medieval Irish History Podcast

Suggested reading now added below. Were towns introduced by vikings? Were the Irish settled around monastic centres? What actually is a 'town' and what is 'monastic'? In this episode, Dr. Niamh Wycherley invites Dr. Michael Potterton, lecturer in the Department of History at Maynooth University, to discuss some key aspects and intersections between medieval history and archaeology. One of the subjects discussed here is the ongoing 'monastic town' debate, which has been around for decades in academic circles.

(Disclaimer: No, you haven't gone back in time. It is 2024. We recorded before Christmas and weren't clever enough to say 2024 instead of 2023 when mentioning the year.)

Suggested reading. The first two articles detailed below were mentioned during the podcast and they are both by influential historians of early Ireland. There are many more brilliant articles listed in the article by Etchingham detailed below and it is available free online (as of Feb 19th, 2024). I add a third article by John Soderberg to provide a more recent, and archaeological, perspective.

1) Charles Doherty, ‘The Monastic Town in Early Medieval Ireland’, in The Comparative History of Urban Origins in Non-Roman Europe, ed. H. Clarke and A. Simms (Oxford, 1985), pp. 45–75.

2) Colmán Etchingham, 'The Irish ‘monastic town’: is this a valid concept?', Kathleen Hughes memorial lectures 8 (Cambridge, 2010).

3) John Soderberg, 'Anthropological "civitas" and the possibility of monastic towns', The Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland, Vol. 144/145 (2014–2015), pp. 45–59.

Regular episodes every two weeks (on a Friday).

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Supported by the Dept of Early Irish, Maynooth University, & the Irish Research Council. Views expressed are the speakers' own.

Production: Tiago de Oliveira Veloso Silva.

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Music: Lexin_Music