Irish National Institute for Historical Research

Intoxicating Experiences is a collaborative project between UCC, UCD, and the University of Strathclyde, funded by the Wellcome Trust through Oisín Wall's project We Are the Heroin Capital of Europe: Marginal Communities, Health, Identity, and the Opioid Epidemic in Twentieth-Century Ireland.

We are at an exciting moment in drugs and alcohol history, as the fields turn from institutional to cultural and experiential histories. Intoxicating Experiences aims to capture this cultural turn in drugs history as it happens through community building, research, and collaborative publications.

The Giraldus Project

This research project explores the many dimensions of the twelfth-century Cambro-Norman cleric and writer Giraldus Cambrensis (c. 1146–1223). In particular, the project:

• examines Gerald’s connection to Ireland and the Fitzgerald family’s central role in the Anglo-Norman invasion and settlement of the country
• focusses on his writings about Ireland, namely Topographia Hibernica (the first full-length treatment of Ireland by a foreigner) and the Expugnatio Hibernica (the main contemporary prose account of the Anglo-Norman conquest).
• investigates the illustrations, cartographic and other decorative elements found in manuscripts of Gerald’s writings on Ireland, most notably National Library of Ireland’s c. 1200 MS 700 with its unique map of Europe and interactive marginal images.
• seeks to compare his Irish writings with those about his native Wales, the Itinerarium Cambriae and Descriptio Cambriae.
• endeavours to understand the landscape, habitat and environmental aspects of Gerald’s work represented as marvels and wonders.
• undertakes to explain Gerald’s writings within the international intellectual milieu in which he operated as a scholar at the University of Paris, as a courtier of King Henry II of England and as a Church reformer travelling to Rome in the Age of Crusade.
• shows how Gerald’s writings subverted centuries of positive representations of the Irish as saints and scholars by depicting the Anglo-Norman conquest as a providential civilising mission to primitive, violent, sexually deviant barbarians.
• examines the afterlives and receptions of Gerald’s texts in the later medieval and early modern periods, particularly the fierce polemic his work gave rise to the age of Print and Protestantism.
• intends to establish once and for all Gerald’s Irish writings as fundamental and pioneering texts in the history of colonialism.
• This UCC project works with other scholars interested in Giraldus Cambrensis, with archives that hold originals and copies of his manuscripts and more widely with civic and national institutions interested in Ireland’s Anglo-Norman heritage.

So far our Giraldus project has run an innovative, well-attended conference entitled Gerald of Wales: Identity, Afterlives and Wonders (21st & 22^nd November 2025)

The intention is to develop from this an appropriate volume for a publication on Gerald and his impact during ‘The European Year of the Normans’ in 2027.

Project leaders:

Dr Diarmuid Scully (d.scully@ucc.ie)

Dr Hiram Morgan (h.morgan@ucc.ie

Dr Natasha Dukelow (ndukelow@ucc.ie)