RHS Anniversary Lecture: ‘Visible | Invisible: Voices of Women in Early Modern Ireland’

28 November 2025

In this event Professor Jane Ohlmeyer (Trinity College Dublin) presented her lecture on ‘Visible | Invisible: Voices of Women in Early Modern Ireland’.

The lecture, which was the Society’s 2025 Anniversary Lecture, took place on Friday 21 November 2025 and was hosted by the Royal Historical Society, UK.

 

 

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About this lecture

This lecture draws on findings from VOICES, an Advanced European Research Council grant (2023-28) that documents the lived experiences of non-elite women in Ireland between 1550 and 1700 and who have largely been ignored by scholars more interested in privileging the stories of men of power and influence.

These women lived in patriarchal societies where they were regarded as being subordinate to men in the domestic and public spheres. This patriarchy and misogyny are baked into most of the extant records, which helps to explain the invisibility of these women, along with the more general scarcity of historical sources recording their lives.

How can technologies, especially those associated with Artificial Intelligence and the Knowledge Graph, render visible the invisible and help to recover the lived experiences women in historical records? How can this be done at scale and ethically? How can we ensure that methodologies and processes developed as part of VOICES cross time and place and are replicable in other regions and time periods?

About our speaker

Professor Jane Ohlmeyer MRIA, FBA, FTCD, FRHistS, is Erasmus Smith’s Professor of Modern History (1762) at Trinity College Dublin. She was a driving force behind the 1641 Depositions Project and the development of the Trinity Long Room Hub Arts and Humanities Research Institute. Jane chaired the Irish Research Council (2015-21). In 2023, she received an Advanced ERC for VOICES, a project on the lived experiences of women in early modern Ireland.

Jane is the author or editor of numerous articles and 14 books. Her latest, Making Empire: Ireland, Imperialism and the Early Modern World (Oxford, 2023), is based on the 2021 Ford Lectures in Oxford. In 2023 she was awarded the Royal Irish Academy Gold Medal in the Humanities. She is currently working with Briona Ni Dhiarmada on a booked called From that Small Island. The Story of the Irish which is based on a 4-part documentary and a feature.