Ep. 22 - Panel 5B - Representation of Irish Nationalist Women - Maelle Le Roux (UL)

NPPSH Conference

The Capuchin Annual was a periodical published between 1930 and 1977 by Irish Franciscan Capuchins, a Roman Catholic order. Over 44 issues it contains various articles written by members of various Catholic orders and by authors who were not members of the Catholic Church. It is known to have held nationalist views, even at a time when the Catholic Church and the Irish state were opposed to nationalist movements. It was digitized and made available online for scholarly use in 2016. Even prior to digitization it was widely used in scholarly studies, especially its 1966 issue, but so far, no work has focused exclusively on the periodical itself and its links to nationalism. This study will use ‘history of representations’ methods, a cultural history method which analyses social representations in cultural objects and often draws on sociolinguistics. As this research draws on digitized materials, this study is also linked to digital humanities methods. As women’s participation in the revolutionary events was not always recognized, and in keeping with the conference theme, this paper will examine their representation, or lack of, in the Capuchin Annual. It will determine if their under recognition also affected their representations. Through the textual analysis of their mentions in the periodical, it will determine which criteria are used to describe nationalist women. The data will then be compared to men’s representations to see how the patterns differ. Maelle Le Roux started studying for her PhD in January 2018 at University of Limerick, in the Department of History and School of Modern Languages and Applied Linguistics. Her research focuses on the representations of Irish nationalist figures in the Capuchin Annual. She has a Research MA in History from Université Paris-Sorbonne (June 2016), for which she wrote two dissertations, the first on Masculinity in youth literature in France (1960s and 1980s), in 2015, and the second on the representations of the 1916 Easter Rising for children in Ireland (1923-2016), in 2016. Both used cultural history methods.