Dr Małgorzata Krasnodębska-D’Aughton is a Senior Lecturer in the School of History, University College Cork. She specialises in the cultural and religious history of the Middle Ages, and has published internationally on the Irish mendicant orders, liturgical silver, Irish illuminated manuscripts as well as on manuscripts in Polish libraries. She co-edited Monastic Europe. Medieval communities, landscapes, and settlement (Brepols, 2019, with Edel Bhreathnach and Keith Smith), and more recently Mendicants on the margins. Geographical, social and historiographical margins in the study of medieval and early modern mendicant orders (Cork University Press, 2024, with Anne-Julie Lafaye). She is currently working on a monograph entitled Image and identity: Franciscan ideologies in medieval Ireland which focuses on the formation and expression of Franciscan institutional identities.
Between 2004 and 2008, as an IRCHSS (Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences) Research Fellow at the Mícheál Ó Cléirigh Institute, University College Dublin, Dr D’Aughton carried out an important survey of both medieval and early modern artefacts from existing mendicant houses in Ireland, with many of these objects being previously uncatalogued and unpublished. The project resulted in numerous papers, book chapters and an exhibition titled Franciscan Faith. The exhibition was housed in the National Museum of Ireland, and presented Franciscan objects, mainly chalices. She has also worked on the Medieval Ireland exhibition, which is permanently on display at the National Museum of Ireland.
Dr D’Aughton’s interests in communicating the past to non-academic audiences include her work on theatre productions based on a fourteenth-century pilgrimage text and her contribution as a history commentator to three radio programmes. The radio programmes were broadcast by RTÉ Lyric FM, as a five-part series that included 'Friars Walk', 'Christmas Postcards’ and ‘Jerusalem Passion', with the latter listed as a finalist for the New York Festivals: World's Best Radio Programs in 2018.
Theme of the lecture
In the summer of 2021, a silver gilt chalice was sold at an auction by Duke’s Auctioneers of Dorchester. The catalogue described the chalice as ‘an exceptionally rare Irish silver-gilt chalice, circa 1480’. Since its purchase by the current owner, who named it the Ó Learghusa Chalice, it has featured in articles and on television in the United States, where it has also gone on exhibition at major universities and has been used in Mass celebrations, including Washington National Cathedral. Now, visiting Monaco, which marks the last stop on the chalice’s travels, it will go on permanent loan to Kylemore Abbey in Ireland.
Like so many other liturgical objects that managed to endure the vagaries of time, its full story remains a mystery. It was conceived as a sacred vessel for Eucharistic wine. At some point in its history, the chalice was damaged and received a new cup and a new foot. Unfortunately, its replacement parts suffered further injuries: the replacement foot lost an image of the cross that had been attached to it, and now only three small holes and one remaining rivet suggest its presence.
In the course of over two years of academic investigations, the chalice was approached from historical, art historical and scientific perspectives by scholars from University College Cork’s Department of History, the Department of Modern Irish and the Tyndall National Institute as well as museum practitioners from the National Museum of Ireland and the UCC’s librarians. The Inks & Skins project (a collaboration between the UCC’s Department of Modern Irish and the Tyndall Institute) conducted an XRF (X-ray fluorescence) investigation of the chalice alongside two chalices of confirmed Irish provenance to determine its metal composition. Importantly, the research is the first XRF investigation conducted on three late medieval chalices associated with Ireland. These multidisciplinary approaches have revealed that the object was made by silversmiths who used medieval metallurgy techniques and who employed a repertoire of late medieval designs.
The paper presents the research findings stemming from this multidisciplinary and multi-institutional approach to an object. As seen in the paper, the mystery of the chalice’s history relates to the scarcity of contextual evidence. To contextualise the fate of liturgical objects, the paper will look at the surviving archival material and objects associated with Kilconnell Franciscan friary in County Galway. This medieval friary founded by the O’Kelly family, housed at the end of the seventeenth century around thirty liturgical objects, including a chalice inscribed with the name of William O’Kelly and dated to 1409. The most precious objects, such as the O’Kelly chalice were taken from the friary for safekeeping during the troubled seventeenth century, with some being moved to continental Europe. Most of these chalices have now been lost.
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This event is made possible by the generous support of our patron Mr Martin Dunphy.