Dr Bronagh Ann McShane delivered the opening keynote lecture at the 2025 Catholic Record Society Conference, held in July at Hinsley Hall, Leeds. Her address, “Hiding in Plain Sight: Women, Agency, and Catholicism in Early Modern Ireland,” presented new insights from the ERC Advanced Grant–funded VOICES Project, led by Professor Jane Ohlmeyer at Trinity College Dublin.
Drawing on extensive archival research, the lecture examined how Catholic women in seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Ireland operated within the Protestant legal system to maintain religious practice, kinship networks, and community structures during periods of suppression. Dr McShane highlighted how wills and probate records, documents preserved within institutions that sought to marginalise Catholic identity, capture women’s voices with unexpected clarity. Far from being passive subjects of the Penal Laws, many women actively used legal mechanisms to assert belief and safeguard family continuity.
Further details are available in the blog post here.
