Medieval Irish Dominican Studies

Benedict O’Sullivan OP. Edited by Hugh Fenning OP

These studies on the Dominicans or Friars Preachers of medieval Ireland are unique, for no other account of equal length exists. The author, Father Benedict O’Sullivan, published them in twenty-seven successive articles in The Irish Rosary between 1948 and 1953. Since that monthly journal, defunct since the early 1960s, can scarcely now be found, the very existence of Father O’Sullivan’s work is known to few and read by hardly anyone. Little now appears in print relative to ecclesiastical concerns after 1200. Father O’Sullivan’s narrative account of the Dominicans in medieval Ireland may not be the last word on the subject, but it is certainly the first and is still the only one to hand.

Hugh Fenning is archivist of the Irish Dominican province. He is the author of The undoing of the Friars of Ireland. A study of the novitiate question in the eighteenth century (1972), and The Irish Dominican Province, 1698–1797 (1991).