Gráinne Ní Mháille and Joan Fitzgerald with Emily Little

We have a special episode today with recent Maynooth graduate Emily Little winner of the NUI Mansion House prize for her BA in Irish history. Emily is currently a secondary school teacher and studying for her Professional Masters in Education and makes an inspiring appeal for a reevaluation of the junior cert History curriculum. Recent reforms in historiographical approaches and archival practices have allowed for the rescuing of women from historical obscurity and it is clear that women who exercised political or social influence were not necessarily 'exceptional' or rare. Joan Fitzgerald, Countess of Ormond, Desmond and Ossory and Gráinne Ní Mháille, AKA Grace O’Malley, the so-called Pirate Queen, are two such women whose legacies have benefitted from the increased scholarship on women's history. Though active during different political periods of the 16th century and having contrasting experiences of English colonisation in Ireland, the lives of these two women provide many points of comparison, and are linked by their relationships with Queen Elizabeth I.

Suggested reading:

Frances Nolan and Bronagh McShane, ‘Introduction: A New Agenda for Women's and Gender History in Ireland' in Irish Historical Studies, xlvi (2022), pp. 207–216

Ciarán Brady, ‘Political Women and Reform in Tudor Ireland’ in Margaret MacCurtain and Mary O'Dowd (eds), Women in Early Modern Ireland (Edinburgh, 1991)

Karen Ann Holland, ‘Joan Desmond, Ormond and Ossory: The World of a Countess in Sixteenth Century Ireland’ (PhD thesis, Providence College, Rhode Island, 1995)

Damien Duffy, Aristocratic Women in Ireland 1450-1660 (Woodbridge, 2021)

Anne Chambers, Granuaile: the life and times of Grace O’Malley c.1530-1603 (Portmarnock, 2003)

Brendan Kane and Valerie McGowan-Doyle (eds), Elizabeth I and Ireland (Cambridge, 2014)

Regular episodes every two weeks (on a Friday)

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Producer: Tiago Veloso Silva

Supported by the Dept of Early Irish, Maynooth University & Taighde Éireann/Research Ireland.

Views expressed are the speakers' own.

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Music: Lexin_Music