Monsignor Patrick J Corish Lecture 2012

You are invited to
‘The Sacrality of Things:
An Inquiry into Divine Materiality in the Christian Middle Ages’
by Professor Caroline Walker Bynum

Tuesday 27 March 2012 at 7.30 p.m.
Renehan Hall, St Patrick’s College, Maynooth

Professor Caroline Walker Bynum

• Professor emerita of Medieval European History, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, New Jersey
• Professor emerita, Columbia University, New York.
• Professor Bynum’s work has been instrumental in introducing the concept of gender into the study of medieval Christianity. Her ground-breaking studies, Holy Feast and Holy Fast (1987) and The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christendom (1995), created the paradigm for the study of women’s piety that dominates the field today and helped propel the history of the body into a major area of pre-modern European Studies. Her recent works comprise a radical reinterpretation of the nature of Christianity on the eve of the sixteenth-century reformations. Wonderful Blood (2007), which won the American Academy of Religion’s Award for Excellence in Historical Studies among other prizes, examines the phenomenon of blood piety in fifteenth-century northern Germany in its larger European context. Her most recent study, Christian materiality (2011) locates the upsurge in new forms of art and devotion in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries against the background of changes in natural philosophy and theology. She is currently working on medieval devotional objects in a comparative and cross-cultural perspective.

Monsignor Patrick J Corish

Patrick J Corish, a native of County Wexford, is a priest of the diocese of Ferns. For many years he was professor of history in Saint Patrick's College Maynooth, in succession to the late Cardinal Tomás Ó Fiaich. Patrick Corish was the kind of teacher for whom every student longed. Entertaining, dedicated, serious, penetrating, supportive and challenging all at once, for many he was simply the best teacher they ever had. For his professional colleagues he was a first class researcher, introducting to Irish ecclesiastical history in particular the scholarly innovations and methodological advances characteristic of the best continental historiography.  He contributed crucially to the growth and consolidation of the department of history in Maynooth and ensured its status as the preeminent department in the Faculty and one of the best in these islands. An engaging and talented writer, his books, articles and reviews constitute an important historical corpus in themselves and remain the sine qua non for an informed understanding of the history of the early modern Irish Catholic community. His history of Maynooth College (1995) is well known and few books made as deep an impression on contemporaries as his provocative, elegant and eminently readable The Irish Catholic Experience (1985). He acted for many years as the editor of the sources journal Archivium Hibernicum and coordinated the History of Irish Catholicism project. His work on the early modern Irish martyrs, along with that of Benignus Millett OFM, was crucial to the success of their cause in Rome. He is now retired in Naas.