Eye-witness statements of murder, pillage, rape and everyday life in 17th century Ireland go online this week as a set of aged and priceless manuscripts relating a bloody rebellion in 17th century Ireland is be made publicly accessible for the first time.
The ambitious research project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences (IRCHSS) has been seeking to transcribe and digitise depositions relating to the rebellion by the Catholic Irish in 1641 – one of the most violent moments of Irish history.
The rare manuscript collection is located in the Library of Trinity College Dublin and consists of 3,400 depositions, examinations and associated materials. Depositions are witness statements – in this case mostly from Protestants – and describe incidents of murder, rape, and pillage but also include many intriguing aspects of everyday life in the 1600s.
Collected by government-appointed commissioners, the witness testimony runs to over 19,000 pages. However, due to the antiquity and fragility of the material they are difficult to access and to read, which, until now, has severely restricted their research potential.
The project, which is supported by a €1million investment, involves an international collaboration of researchers from the Trinity College Dublin (TCD) and the universities of Cambridge and Aberdeen. The methods employed in the collaborative research have included digital imaging and transcription of the source material, online publication of both the digital images and transcripts as well as the formulation of databases which will be searchable across a wide variety of fields.
TCD’s Professor Jane Ohlmeyer, Head of the School of Histories and Humanities and one of the Principal Investigators (PI) of the project explains, “This body of material, unparalleled elsewhere in early modern Europe, provides a unique source of information for the causes and events surrounding the 1641 rebellion and for the social, economic, cultural, religious, and political history of seventeenth-century Ireland, England and Scotland.”
John Morrill, Professor of British and Irish History at the University of Cambridge, one of the PIs on this project , said: ‘These are the records of many thousands of men, women and children born in Ireland or settlers from England and Scotland and Ireland who were killed, assaulted and driven from their homes. These were massacres that resulted in terrible acts of revenge — the so-called curse of Cromwell. It is fitting that this project, making available the distressed voices of survivors, should be in the hands of scholars from universities in each of the three kingdoms so deeply affected by the events they describe so vividly: the ancient universities of Aberdeen, Cambridge and Dublin’
The digitised documents will be made freely available online for the benefit of both the academic community and the general public. Web site publication will give users access to all images and transcripts, with search options allowing free text search.
Thomas Bartlett, Professor of Irish History at the University of Aberdeen and a PI on the project says, “The 1641 Rebellion was one of the most shattering experiences in Irish history. It ranks in importance and in lasting impact with the 1798 Rebellion and the Irish Civil War.
“The digitisation of the 1641 Depositions – the records of what many thousands of Scots, English and Irish caught up in that tumultuous event saw, experienced and endured during the 1640s – will make available on line for the first time the necessary records to study the Rebellion in its entirety. This is a landmark moment in the study of Irish history.”
Professor Ohlmeyer concludes, “Making the depositions available online will greatly facilitate their use by a wide audience. In addition, the transcriptions will also be of great interest to the general public, both for historical and genealogical purposes.”
The depositions from Ulster are available online from today and those for the three remaining provinces by September 2010. Click here to go to the project website.
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