You are cordially invited to ‘The Sacrality of Things:
An Inquiry into Divine Materiality in the Christian Middle Ages’ by Professor
Caroline Walker Bynum

Tuesday 27 March 2012 at 7.30 p.m.
Renehan Hall, St Patrick’s College, Maynooth

Professor Caroline Walker Bynum is professor emerita of
Medieval European History, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton,
New Jersey and of Columbia
University, New York. Her work
has been instrumental in introducing the concept of gender into the study of
medieval Christianity. Her ground-breaking studies, t Holy Feast and Holy Fast (1987) and
The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christendom (1995), created the
paradigm for the study of women’s piety that dominates the field today and
helped propel the history of the body into a major area of pre-modern European
Studies. Her recent works comprise a radical reinterpretation of the nature of
Christianity on the eve of the sixteenth-century reformations. Wonderful
Blood (2007), which won the American Academy of Religion’s Award for
Excellence in Historical Studies among other prizes, examines the phenomenon of
blood piety in fifteenth-century northern Germany in its larger European
context. Her most recent study, Christian materiality (2011) locates
the upsurge in new forms of art and devotion in the fourteenth and fifteenth
centuries against the background of changes in natural philosophy and theology.
She is currently working on medieval devotional objects in a comparative and
cross-cultural perspective.

Patrick J Corish, a native of County Wexford,
is a priest of the diocese of Ferns. For many years he was professor of history
in Saint Patrick’s College Maynooth, in succession to the late Cardinal Tomás Ó
Fiaich. Patrick Corish was the kind of teacher for whom every student longed.
Entertaining, dedicated, serious, penetrating, supportive and challenging all
at once, for many he was simply the best teacher they ever had. For his
professional colleagues he was a first class researcher, introducting to Irish
ecclesiastical history in particular the scholarly innovations and
methodological advances characteristic of the best continental
historiography.  He contributed crucially to the growth and consolidation
of the department of history in Maynooth and ensured its status as the
preeminent department in the Faculty and one of the best in these islands. An
engaging and talented writer, his books, articles and reviews constitute an
important historical corpus in themselves and remain the sine qua non
for an informed understanding of the history of the early modern Irish Catholic
community. His history of Maynooth College (1995) is well known and few books
made as deep an impression on contemporaries as his provocative, elegant and
eminently readable The Irish Catholic Experience (1985). He acted for
many years as the editor of the sources journal Archivium Hibernicum
and coordinated the History of Irish Catholicism project. His work on
the early modern Irish martyrs, along with that of Benignus Millett OFM, was
crucial to the success of their cause in Rome. He is now retired in Naas.