Abstract
Little archaeological work has been undertaken on nunneries in later medieval Ireland as spaces of female spirituality. This is in part due to the fact that they are generally less well preserved than contemporary male monasteries. Even less research has been done on male or female monastic estates, their topography and the networks they represent. These estates are known to have existed from documentary sources and would have included a variety of land holdings, rights and benefi ces. Through the use of the nunnery of St Mary’s Timolin, Kildare, as a case study, this paper assesses its nunnery estate and concludes that, for the most part, it was a consolidated estate within easy reach of the nunnery itself. This desk-based study using historical evidence hopes to highlight the archaeological research potential of fi eldwork on the Timolin holdings and the future potential to study other nunneries in this way.
Highlights
Little archaeological work has been undertaken on nunneries in later medieval Ireland as spaces of female spirituality
Studies of monastic space and female spirituality are usually confined to nunnery cloisters and churches and how these spaces might have been used by the female communities and others[29]
Place name evidence is useful in identifying monastic estate features in Britain, such as deer parks or rabbit warrens, which are associated with place names such as burg, burrow, buries, coning-erth or conygarth[77]
Summary
There are approximately 65 female religious houses or nunneries known to have existed in the later medieval period on the island of Ireland. This compares to almost 153 nunneries in England, 15 in Scotland and three in Wales[16]. There were several smaller male houses in the county that were valued at much less than the nunneries It can be concluded, in the case of the Kildare nunneries at least, that the nunneries were relatively wealthy when compared to their male counterparts and that Timolin was typical of a later medieval religious house there[28].
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