Hagiography in Modern Irish History

Published on
Thursday 29 January 2015
Category
College & Community
Wolfson People

29 January 2015

On Tuesday, Professor Roy Foster opened this year's Weinrebe Lectures in Life-Writing in a lecture entitled 'The Making of Saints: Politics, Biography and Hagiography in Modern Irish History' with a fascinating account of the reasons behind, and the process of, the sanctification of the leaders of the Irish Revolution. 

Drawing on the extensive research behind his most recent book ‘Vivid Faces: The Revolutionary Generation in Ireland' he showed how the deeply conservative Catholic structures that emerged in Ireland after the revolution were the antithesis of the radical, liberal, and frequently sexually liberated lives the revolutionaries lived before 1916.

The subject for this year's Weinrebe lectures, which are named after the philanthropist Harry Weinrebe, the founder of the Dorset Foundation which funds the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing, is ‘Political History and Life-Writing', and Professor Foster's lecture was an absorbing insight into the way that participants and observers can remake their images.

The College President, Professor Dame Hermione Lee, introduced Professor Foster as a world-renowned historian who is a ‘byword for scrupulous scholarship'. She praised his ability to write with ‘adventurousness, and historical courage' and highlighted his ‘refusal to collapse ideas into generalisations'.

Professor Foster showed how Ireland's tradition as ‘The Isle of Saints and Scholars' fed into accounts of the revolution for many decades after the facts. Evidence of the revolutionaries' ‘debauched' behaviour was rejected as English propaganda. Most famously, the so-called Black Diaries of Roger Casement, executed for High Treason in 1916, chronicled a life of promiscuous homosexuality. Among Irish nationalists, Professor Foster described, the rejection of the authenticity of these diaries was a ‘statement of faith'.

Following the lecture, Professor Foster answered questions on the revolutionaries association with America and the wider socialist/communist international community.

Next week's lecture will be given by Professor Lord Peter Hennessy on the topic of ‘The importance of being personal: Political history and life'. All are very welcome.