‘Understanding Irish Medieval Insular mendicants in their International Context: The Dominicans’ (original) (raw)
The survival rate of mendicant buildings in Ireland offers a valuable opportunity for scholars to study holistically mendicant friaries and their landscapes. Scholars in England, France and Italy have long studied mendicant settlements using cross-disciplinary methodologies but have been hampered by a lack of physical remains. This paper presented the results of a research which adopted a genuinely cross-disciplinary approach - based specifically on the French tradition of Annales scholarship (associated with Georges Duby, Jacques le Goff and others) - to study the remains of Irish mendicant friaries, combining original documentary research, building-analysis, and reconstructions of the topographies of the friary hinterlands. This approach also entailed to place the mendicant settlements in international context, recognising that mendicantism was an international movement, elements of which crossed political and cultural boundaries. The multi-disciplinary approach and the introduction of comparisons with mendicant settlements abroad have led to more complex and layered conclusions than had been reached in the traditional historiography, which has presented the mendicant settlements as part of the ‘two nations’ narrative, an interpretation based on a limited knowledge of European material and too-great an emphasis on ethnicity. This paper presented an overview of the research conclusions, including a re-evaluation of the relation between patrons and friars, showing more collaboration between them and affirming the role of the orders and of their interests and objectives in the choice of settlements, while adapting to the local political and economic context; a new understanding of the material impact of the friaries on the Irish medieval landscape; a new reading of the architectural language of the friaries, with the identification of both local developments and of their connections to a wider European Gothic tradition; and an interpretation of the mendicants’ approach to space through a study of the spatial organisation of the friaries never undertaken before, showing that their approach to space was both functional and symbolic.
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