School of History, UCC

Dr Sparky Booker, School of History and Geography, Dublin City University

29 September 2022, 16.00 (4 PM)

The paper will be delivered via MS Teams. To obtain a Teams link, please, contact Dr Jérôme aan de Wiel: j.aandewiel@ucc.ie

Paper The custom whereby women took their husband’s surnames upon marriage was not in place in the English colony in late medieval Ireland. Instead, women in the colony, many of them of English descent, usually retained their natal/maiden names. In this, the colony was in line with many areas of medieval Europe, but it differed from England, where the adoption of marital surnames was the norm. This difference is interesting in light of the fact that England and English Ireland shared a legal system and patterns of inheritance. Thus, the adoption of marital names, which has often been linked to the practice of coverture under common law, may instead be linked to other social, cultural, or economic factors. This paper examines the naming practices of married women in the English colony and compares them to those elsewhere in Europe to gain insight into the social meanings of married names in the later Middle Ages. Dr Sparky Booker (sparky.booker@dcu.ie) is a historian of law, culture, and society in late medieval Ireland. She is Assistant Professor in history at the School of History and Geography at Dublin City University. Before she took this post in 2021, she was a lecturer in medieval Irish history at Queen’s University Belfast. Sparky has published on many aspects of late medieval Irish history, including women and the law, sumptuary law, intermarriage, and Irish migration into and exchange within the English colony. She is the author of Cultural Exchange and Identity in Late Medieval Ireland: The English and Irish of the Four obedient shires (2018), published by Cambridge University Press in their ‘Studies in Medieval Life and Thought’ series and editor of Tales of Medieval Dublin (2014).