About the VOICES collaboration
VOICES is a five-year (2023-2028) European Research Council project, led by Professor Jane Ohlmeyer from the School of Histories and Humanities at Trinity College Dublin, it aims to:
- Uncover the roles women played in Ireland during a time of significant economic, political, and cultural change.
- Document women’s experiences of social upheaval, civil war, and extreme trauma, with a particular focus on sexual violence.
- Utilize the power of AI and knowledge graph technology to represent and amplify these women’s voices.
This project will offer a new narrative of early modern Ireland by placing women’s perspectives at the forefront of Irish history.
The Chancery pleadings
The VOICES team identified the Chancery pleadings, as a core collection to research. They estimate that approximately 20% of Chancery cases in Ireland involved women, making it one of the most significant collections for studying early modern Irish women’s history.
The Chancery Pleadings in the National Archives are the largest set of parchment records to survive the 1922 Public Record Office fire, which occurred during the Irish civil war. These records, mostly on vellum, relating to legal cases in the 16th-17th centuries were badly damaged in the fire.
To date, 5,600 damaged documents have been conserved by the National Archives and listed. There is a hard copy finding aid in the National Archive Reading Room which runs to 457 pages.
Thanks to the significant work of the National Archives over in the years in terms of the conservation and archival listing the collections can be easily accessed.
Working with the National Archives, the project researchers will digitise over 1,100 documents. The pleadings are written in a non-standardised early modern English, which can be difficult to read, so with the aid of text recognition AI software the project hopes to bring to transcribe the documents, uncovering the stories with in them and let the voices of the women be heard.
Find out more about the project
Voices of Women in Early Modern Ireland – VOICES (voicesproject.ie)
