Medieval Irish Chancery Project - new Calendar of Irish Chancery Letters, c.1244–1509

The September issue of the Newsletter of the Irish Genealogical Research Society outlines the Irish Chancery Project. This project, which is funded by the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences, seeks to reconstruct the records of the medieval Irish chancery, which were destroyed by the explosion and fire at the Four Courts in 1922. In the absence of the original rolls of chancery, the project team is drawing on copies, antiquarian transcripts and calendars ranging in date from the 14th to the 19th centuries and surviving in repositories in Ireland, England and North America. The result will be a new Calendar of Irish Chancery Letters, c.1244–1509 (known as CIRCLE), which will be published on the web. The publication of CIRCLE in June 2011 will do much to revitalize late medieval Irish studies by providing both specialist researchers and the general public with ready access to an unparalleled source of information for the first time. The project’s ancillary publications seek to set the medieval Irish experience of colonialism in a wider comparative framework. To mark the launch of CIRCLE, a major international conference will be held at Trinity College, Dublin (16–18 June 2011) on the theme of ‘Empires and Bureaucracy in European History’.