‘The Dominicans in Ireland: Role and impact of a mendicant order in a non-urban environment’ (original) (raw)

Abstract

This conference held in the University of South Denmark in Odense focused on the role of the Dominicans in the medieval society of Northern Europe, and in my contribution I chose to discuss the impact of the friars in the largely rural landscapes of medieval Ireland. Ireland experienced relatively limited urbanisation in the Middle Ages, and its handful of cities and scores of modest boroughs might not have appeared as the ideal environment for the Dominican order to thrive, as they favoured large and populous towns elsewhere. But in Ireland too the success of the order was immediate, and a number of foundations occurred, from early on, in the non-urban landscapes of the country. Using a number of case studies, I showed how the political and economic context of medieval Ireland meant that patronage became available in places where urban settlements simply did not exist, but where wealthy aristocratic families wished for the friars to settle: in newly founded boroughs, no larger than villages and of little resemblance to urban centres both in terms of physical characteristics and socio-economic fabric, or even in rural areas nowhere near nucleated settlements. I looked at the circumstances around the establishment of these communities, and at the friars’ role and impact in such landscapes, in regards to their spiritual and pastoral activities, socio-economic practice, and to the physical and architectural presence of their friaries in relation to both these activities, and to their benefactors’ own pious, political and economic interests.

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