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Jennifer O'Reilly

Dr Jennifer O'Reilly played a key role in establishing the degree programme in History of Art at UCC, where she lectured on medieval history between 1975 and her retirement in 2008.

Her scholarly interests and publications lay principally in three areas: the iconography of early Irish and Anglo-Saxon art; the writings of Bede the Venerable and Adomnán of Iona; and medieval hagiography. In these areas she explored the intimate relations between medieval texts and images and the traditions of biblical exegesis shaped by the Church Fathers. Her teaching inspired generations of students, many of whom went on to complete doctorates under her supervision. In retirement she continued to write extensively, and she gave numerous public lectures, including the Jarrow Lecture and the Brixworth Lecture. She was a Member of the Royal Irish Academy and a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries.

Obituary, The Irish Times, 5 March 2016

The Cork medieval scholar Jennifer O’Reilly, who has died aged 72, was a gifted university teacher and a renowned authority on The Book of Kells and similar treasures of antiquity. In her long and distinguished career, she made substantial and groundbreaking contributions in the fields of history, theology, art history and manuscript studies. In a moving eulogy, her great friend Colmán Ó Clabaigh O.S.B., of Glenstal Abbey, compared her untimely and unexpected death to ‘watching a library burn’. Describing her as ‘a gifted communicator’, he said it was ‘impossible to leave one of her lectures unmoved and without wanting to hear more. Nor was this ability confined to adult audiences: there is a wonderful picture of her and Terry teaching their eldest grandchild, Liam, to read.

Renowned academic authority on The Book of Kells

‘She is gazing at the text with the same intensity with which she scrutinised the Book of Kells or the Lindisfarne Gospels. The book in this case was Bob the Builder and the Little Blue Van.’ Brother Ó Clabaigh said that it was true that she looked with wry amusement and dry wit at university politics and policies. But in the twenty years he knew her he never once heard her utter an unkind or uncharitable word about anyone. ‘How to put this delicately? This is not a common virtue in Irish universities. Nor is it a common attribute of Irish monasteries so I certainly am not speaking from any position of moral authority’.

Lifelong engagement

Born in the UK and educated at the Barr’s Hill School in Coventry, O’Reilly obtained her first degree in 1964 from the University of Nottingham, where she studied under the medieval historians James Holt and Bernard Hamilton, and the art historian Alastair Smart. She was awarded the Diploma of Education with a distinction by the University of Oxford. The O’Reilly family moved to Cork in 1975. A devout woman, she had a lifelong engagement with Christianity and her great love was to study and teach the history and art of these islands in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages. She played a key role in establishing the BA programme in the history of art at University College Cork. In her academic research, she was particularly interested in the connections between Ireland and Britain, and the creation of an English Christian community, to which Irish missionaries made a great contribution.

Links with Rome

Her work has added significantly to the understanding of Ireland and Anglo-Saxon England in the early Middle Ages. She also explored relationships between these islands and Rome, and indeed the eastern Mediterranean, through the visual arts and especially Insular gospel books, including the Book of Kells. She examined as well the fusion of barbarian and classical art in these works and saw the key to their puzzling iconography in scriptural exegesis. Her contributions to scholarship were acknowledged in 2005 when she was elected a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, and again in 2007 when she became a member of the Royal Irish Academy, a distinction she shared with her husband, Terence, emeritus professor of Spanish in UCC. In 2008, a two-day conference in her honour was held at the university and at Glenstal, the proceedings of which form the nucleus of the publication Listen, O Isles, Unto Me (2011). Fittingly, the sung music chosen for the funeral service was the Agnus Dei of William Byrd (1543-1623), the Nunc Dimittis of Christopher Tye (1505-1573?) and the Congregational Hymn of George Herbert (1593-1633). She is survived by her husband, Terence, and sons Michael and Tom.

The Jennifer O'Reilly Memorial Lecture series

The Memorial Lecture in honour of Jennifer O’Reilly was established in 2017 by the School of History. Each year a distinguished scholar is invited to speak on either the writings of Bede or medieval iconography, two subjects that Dr O’Reilly explored in her research and teaching. The lecture normally takes place in the last week of April.

• The first Memorial Lecture, on Bede and Cassiodorus, was delivered in 2017 by Dr Alan Thacker, the Institute of Historical Research.
• The second Memorial Lecture, ‘Venerating the The Cross around the year 800 in Anglo-Saxon England’, was delivered in 2018 by Professor Jane Hawkes, University of York.
• The lecturer in April 2019 will be Professor Máire Herbert, University College Cork.

The Jennifer O'Reilly Prize in Medieval History

To mark Dr O'Reilly's profound contribution to teaching and research in the School of History, University College Cork, a prize fund has been instituted for the annual award of "The Jennifer O'Reilly Prize in Medieval History". The prize will be awarded in the first instance to the student with the best BA seminar dissertation in Medieval History, achieving at least First Class Honours. In the event of no candidate reaching the required standard in the BA Seminar dissertation in Medieval History, the prize will be awarded to the student with the best written assignment in Third Year Medieval History (3,000 words or above), also achieving at least First Class Honours.

Prize winners

• 2017: Natasha Dukelow and Martha Ewence
• 2018: Thomas Grogan

Forthcoming Publications

• History and Biblical Exegesis. Essays on Bede the Venerable, Adomnán of Iona and the lives of Thomas Becket, TBC (Routledge, Variorum, 2019)
• Early Medieval Text and Image. Essays on Irish and Anglo-Saxon Art, eds. Carol Farr and Elizabeth Mullins (Routledge, Variorum, 2019)

During her lifetime Jennifer O’Reilly was urged by her students and fellow scholars to collect her scattered essays for interested readers, but she did not live to do so.

When she died in 2016, Dr O’Reilly left behind a body of published work in three areas of medieval studies: the writings of Bede and his older Irish contemporary, Adomnán of Iona; the early lives of Thomas Becket; and the iconography of the Gospel Books produced in early medieval Ireland and Anglo-Saxon England. In these three areas she explored the connections between historical texts, artistic images and biblical exegesis. The aim of the two volumes, to be published simultaneously in 2019, is to realise that ambition. Seen together, the essays gathered in these books highlight her distinctive approach to historical sources, and her substantial contribution to our understanding of England and Ireland in the Middle Ages.

Publications

Bede

• Introduction to Bede. On the Temple, tr. Seán Connolly, Translated Texts for Historians, vol. 21 (Liverpool University Press, 1995) xvii–lv.
• ‘Islands and idols at the ends of the earth: exegesis and conversion in Bede’s Historia ecclesiastica’, in Bède le vénérable. Entre tradition et posterité, ed. Stephane Lebecq, Michel Perrin and Olivier Szerwiniack, (Lille, 2005) 119–145.
• ‘Bede on seeing the God of gods in Zion’, in Text, image and interpretation. Studies in Anglo-Saxon literature and its Insular context in honour of Éamonn Ó Carragáin, ed. Alastair Minnis and Jane Roberts, (Brepols, Turnhout, 2007) 3–29.
• ‘The multitude of isles and the corner-stone: topography, exegesis and the identity of the Angli, in Bede’s Historia ecclesiastica’, in Anglo-Saxon Traces, ed. Jane Roberts and Leslie Webster (Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Tempe, 2011) 201–27.
• ‘St Paul and the sign of Jonah. Theology and Scripture in Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica’.
• (Jarrow Lecture, 2014.).
• ‘Bede and Monothelitism’ (In press and forthcoming).
• ‘Bede and the Mediator’ (Forthcoming).

Adomnán

• ‘Reading the Scriptures in the Life of Columba’, in Studies in the cult of St Columba, ed. Cormac Bourke (Dublin, 1997) 80–106.
• ‘The wisdom of the scribe and the fear of the Lord in the Life of St Columba’, in Spes Scotorum. Hope of Scots, ed. Dauvit Broun and Thomas Owen Clancy (Edinburgh, 1999) 159–211.
• ‘Adomnán and the art of teaching spiritual sons’, in Adomnán of Iona: theologian, lawmaker and peacemaker, ed. Jonathan Wooding, Thomas O’Loughlin et al. (Dublin, 2010) 69–94.
• ‘Columba at Clonmacnoise’, in Sacred Histories. A Festschrift for Máire Herbert, ed. John Carey, Kevin Murray and Caitríona Ó Dochartaigh (Dublin, 2015) 380–390.
• ‘The Bible as Map, On Seeing God and Finding the Way: Pilgrimage and Exegesis in Adomnán and Bede’, in Place and Space in the Medieval World, ed. Meg Boulton, Jane Hawkes and Heidi Stoner (Routledge, New York and London, 2018) 210–226.

Thomas Becket

• ‘Candidus et rubicundus: an image of martyrdom in the Lives of Thomas Becket’, Analecta Bollandiana 99 (1981) 303–14.
• ‘The double martyrdom of Thomas Becket: hagiography or history?’, Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History 7 (1985) 185–247.

Medieval Art

• ‘Iconoclasm’, review article, Eastern Churches Review 10 (1978) 165–9.
• Studies in the iconography of the Virtues and Vices in the Middle Ages (New York and London, 1988).
• ‘Early medieval text and image: the wounded and exalted Christ’, Peritia 6–7 (1987–88) 72–118.
• ‘The medieval iconography of the two trees in Eden’, in A walk in the garden: biblical, iconographical and literary images of Eden, ed. P. Morris and D. Sawyer, Journal for the Study of the Old Testament, supplement series 136, (Sheffield, 1992) 167–204.
• ‘Patristic and Insular traditions of the Evangelists: exegesis and iconography’, in Le isole Britanniche e Roma in eta romanobarbarica, ed. A. M. Luiselli and Eamónn Ó Carragáin (Rome, 1998) 49–94.
• ‘Celtic art and the Gospel’, Search 24 (2001) 34–42.
• ‘The art of authority’, in After Rome, ed. Thomas Charles-Edwards (Oxford, 2003) 141–189.
• ‘St John the Evangelist: between two worlds’, in Insular and Anglo-Saxon Art and Thought in the Early Medieval Period, ed. Colum Hourihane (Penn State University Press, 2011) 189–218.
• ‘Seeing the crucified Christ: image and meaning in early Irish manuscript art’, in Envisioning Christ on the Cross in the early medieval West, c.500-1200, ed. Juliet Mullins and Jenifer Ní Gradaigh (Dublin, 2013) 52–82.

The Anglo-Saxon Tradition

• ‘An Anglo-Saxon portable altar: inscription and iconography’ (with Elisabeth Okasha), Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 47 (1984) 32–51.
• ‘The rough-hewn cross in Anglo-Saxon art’, in Ireland and insular art A.D. 500-1200, ed. Michael Ryan (Royal Irish Academy, Dublin, 1987; reprinted 2002) 153–58.
• ‘St John as a figure of the contemplative life: text and image in the art of the Anglo-Saxon Benedictine reform’, in St Dunstan: his life, times and cult, ed. N. L. Ramsay, M. J. Sparks and T. Tatton-Brown (Woodbridge, 1992) 165–85.
• ‘Testo e immagine nella riforma benedettina anglosassone’, in Benedetto l’Eredità Artistica, ed. Roberto Casanelli and E. López-Tello García, (Milan 2007) 95–110. Simultaneous publication in German (Benediktinische Kunst).
• ‘Signs of the Cross’, in The History of British Art 600-1600, ed. Tim Ayers (Tate Britain and the Yale Center for British Art, 2008) 176–99.

Insular Gospel Books

• ‘The Hiberno-Latin tradition of the Evangelists and the Gospels of Mael Brigte’, Peritia 9 (1995) 290–309.
• ‘Gospel harmony and the names of Christ in Insular gospel books’, in The Bible as book: the manuscript tradition, ed. J. Sharpe and K. Van Kampen (London, 1998) 73–88.
• ‘“Know who and what he is”: the context and inscriptions of the Durham Gospels Crucifixion image’, in Making and meaning in Insular Art, ed. Rachel Moss, (Dublin, 2007) 301–16.
• ‘The image of orthodoxy, the mysterium Christi and Insular Gospel books’, in L’Irlanda e gli irlandesi nell’alto medioevo, Settimane di studio della fondazione centro italiano di studi sull’alto medioevo, LVII (2010) 651–705.
• ‘The iconography of the St Gall Gospels’, forthcoming in the commentary volume accompanying the facsimile, ed. Damian Bracken.

The Codex Amiatinus

• ‘“All that Peter stands for”: the romanitas of the Codex Amiatinus reconsidered’, in Anglo-Saxon/Irish relations before the Vikings, ed. James Graham-Campbell and Michael Ryan, Proceedings of the British Academy 157 (Oxford, 2009) 367–95.
• ‘The library of Scripture: views from Vivarium and Wearmouth-Jarrow’, in New offerings, ancient treasures. Studies in medieval art for George Henderson, ed. Paul Binski and Will Noel (Stroud, 2001) 3–39.

The Book of Kells

• ‘The Book of Kells, folio 114: a mystery revealed yet concealed’, in The age of migrating ideas: early medieval art in Britain and Ireland, ed. J. Higgitt and R. M. Spearman (Stroud, 1993) 106–114.
• ‘Exegesis and the Book of Kells: the Lucan genealogy’, in The Book of Kells, ed. Felicity O’Mahony (Aldershot, 1994) 344–97. Reprinted in Scriptural interpretation in the Fathers, ed. Thomas Finn and Vincent Twomey (Dublin, 1995) 315–55.
• ‘The Book of Kells and two Breton gospel books’, in Irlande et Bretagne. Actes du colloque de Rennes 1993, ed. C. Laurent and H. Davis (Rennes, 1994).
• Entry on the Book of Kells, folios 29 and 34, in Histoire de l’écriture, ed. A. M. Christin (Paris, 1997; English version 2002).
• ‘Two pages from the Book of Kells’, in Visual practices across the University, ed. James Elkins, (Munich, 2007) 164–69.
• ‘The Book of Kells, folio 114’, in Treasures of Irish Christianity: people and places, images and texts, ed. Salvador Ryan and Brendan Leahy (Dublin, 2012) 49–52.

External links

1. Obituary, The Irish Times, 5 March 2016: https://www.irishtimes.com/life-and-style/people/renowned-academic-authority-on-the-book-of-kells-1.2560868
2. Jennifer O'Reilly Memorial webpage, University College Cork: https://www.ucc.ie/en/history/drjenniferoreillymemorialpage/