Reading List

Reading List Summer Ireland Program -- Castles in Communities

It will be important for students to look over this material to provide context to your experience in Ireland.  You should know a bit about castles, Medieval Ireland and England, and Irish history in general. Who are the major players historically and archaeologically?  What do they do and think about the past? These become important elements of your experience.   The best place to start is the LIBRARY section of this website. 

There are many people on the project with amazing backgrounds filled with great perspectives on all this stuff, so it is vital to have some basic building block knowhow in the area.

There are various ways to go about this.  You could start with a detailed report of the work at the Ballintober Castle so far.  For this try Niall Brady’s account of the previous research at the Castles Trust site and some of the other site reports in the library.  There are some great reports and photos/figures to download and read.

On the other end of the spectrum it is good to get perspectives on why castles are built in the first place.  For that we send you to Life in The Castle in Medieval England by John Burke.  You can get this book at your local library and I put up the first chapter in PDF in this folder. 

More specifically to Ireland and its archaeology, Chapter 3 and part of Chapter 2 from O’Sullivan and others’ book entitled Early Medieval Ireland, AD 400-1100 was placed in the folder.  https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B1H9T_UEm0fCdUhtYzRVc1JSQVU

We may add several more later on this month!