Event Details

History Department Research Seminar Series The History Department is pleased to host Dr Jesse Harrington (University College Cork), who will present on ‘Irish, Capetian, or Plantagenet? The politics of the canonisation of St Laurence of Dublin, 1180–1227'.

Dr Jesse Harrington (University College Cork), ‘Irish, Capetian, or Plantagenet? The Politics of the Canonisation of St. Laurence of Dublin, 1180–1227'.

This paper presents the first systematic analysis of the politics of the canonisation of St. Lorcán Ua Tuathail (Laurence O'Toole, d. 1180): archbishop of Dublin, papal legate, peacemaker, and powerbroker during Henry II of England's conquest of Ireland. In the five decades between his death in Normandy and papal recognition of his sainthood in 1226, Laurence was the subject of no fewer than six canonisation attempts (at least one in each decade), promoting him as an exiled martyr-saint in the mould of St. Thomas Becket. Nonetheless, the canonisation records have been little studied, and most of the six medieval Latin Lives of St. Laurence, composed by monks, canons, archbishops, and cardinals to promote his cause, have never been printed from their original manuscripts. The canonisation efforts were a major international and cooperative exercise, spread across a political map that stretched from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean: from Gaelic and Anglo-Norman Ireland, to the Capetian and Plantagenet realms of France and England, to as far afield as Rome, Sicily, and Jerusalem. Expanding rapidly outward, they drew a shifting constellation of royal, ecclesiastical, noble, and crusading factions, in support or opposition, in each realm. This paper will reveal for the first time the unlikely coalitions that supported and opposed the saint's cause, the factions that pragmatically changed sides from each attempt to the next, and the circumstances which placed Laurence's canonisation as a driving force of international royal and ecclesiastical politics at the turn of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

Dr. Jesse Patrick Harrington is a Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Research Fellow, at the Irish National Institute for Historical Research and the School of History, University College Cork, researching the life, career, and afterlife of St. Laurence O'Toole. He holds a Ph.D. in History from the University of Cambridge (2018). He has been a visiting researcher at the Norwegian Institute in Rome (2022–23) and will be a visiting researcher at the Centre d'études supérieures de civilisation médiévale, Université de Poitiers (2023), generously supported by a research residency from the French Embassy in Ireland.