ORPHANED ARE SCIENCE AND WISDOM WITHOUT THOSE TO FOSTER THEM: IRISH ANNALISTS, ENVIRONMENTAL CHALLENGES, AND COLONIAL RESISTANCE IN LATE-MEDIEVAL IRELAND FROM 1250-1348

Abstract

This work aims to evaluate the extent to which environmental and political drivers facilitated disruption in early colonial Ireland (1250-1348). Mult-proxy climate data are matched with historical records to track anthropogenic and environmental drivers of disaster during this period. Using the Old-World Drought Atlas (OWDA) dataset, precipitation and drought-year visualizations can be created. Then leveraging the accessibility of Irish annals through CELT, a corpus of digitized and translated texts, year-to-year manuscript entries can be compared to the environmental data to determine driving factors. Analyzing the period of 1250-1348 through the perspectives of Irish annalists and climate reconstructions highlights that the Black Death"”traditionally considered the worst disaster of the medieval period"”was proceeded by a century of colonial and environmental hardships. By building out these contexts, this work seeks to challenge the place of the Black Death as a rupture in the historical record but rather demonstrate how it was a culmination of the hard times experienced by those living in Ireland during this period.