The 2023 Eolas Lecture: Ethics in Medieval Ireland and the Ethics of Medieval Irish Studies
Published in Eolas: Journal of the American Society for Irish Medieval Studies, 2024.
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Abstract
Originally given as the Eolas Lecture at the International Congress on Medieval Studies at Kalamazoo in 2023, this exploratory essay poses two overlapping questions: did medieval Irish intellectuals think about "ethics" (as distinct from "morality," say, or "law") in ways that can be traced in our surviving sources; and what are the ethical standards to which we might hold ourselves in medieval Irish studies, as a modern academic discipline, in relation to issues such as publication, reviewing, our approach to sources, and how we interact with each other? Ethics, as a philosophical sub-discipline, encompasses many aspects of human behavior, past and present, and this essay suggests that it is essential, both individually as scholars and collectively as a discipline, to think about how we can write ethically, review ethically, and participate ethically in academic life. It also argues that we can indeed see a strand of thinking about ethics in medieval Ireland, and that further work is required to disentangle it from other established frameworks for understanding the actions of individuals.