No abstract
T.W. Moody and the origins of Irish Historical Studies: a biographical memoir I n the summer of 1931, in the National Library of Ireland, I was introduced to Theodore William Moody. We were both so much interested in historical studies that we immediately became interested in one another's research. As it happened, both of us were concerned with the seventeenth century and we found that we held comparable views on many issues. When I decided to go to London to extend my researches, I wrote to Moody seeking advice as to where to stay. He got me a room in the house where he himself was staying in Bloomsbury and for nearly a year we had a most pleasant exchange of historical views when we met in the evenings. An additional common bond was an interest in classical music and so we also went to concerts together. In London Moody was very popular with his fellow students. Moody had been engaged in research in London archives for a year before my arrival and had come to be aware of the complexities of historical research which were increasingly revealed at the seminars at the University of London's Institute of Historical Research. He had arrived in London from the Queen's University of Belfast, where he had attended the classes of a dedicated historian, J.E. Todd, who inspired various students to undertake research, including, as well as Moody, D.B. Quinn. Fortuitously, my lecturers in University College, Dublin, had had little connexion with historical research and had advised me to consult Edmund Curtis of Trinity College. It was he who suggested to me a topic centring around the Irish catholics and the penal laws, which became the subject of my doctoral dissertation for .London University. 1 Some time after Moody left London to take up a lectureship in Belfast, I met him again in the National Library of Ireland in Dublin. This was the occasion when the director of the National Library, Richard Irvine Best, reminded his young visitors that James F. Kenney in his great work on the sources of early Irish history had pointed out that in Ireland there was no association for the study of Irish history, no Irish historical review. 2 Theo and I left our meeting with Best determined to alter that state of affairs. 'R.W. Dudley Edwards, "The history of penal laws against catholics in Ireland from 1534 to the treaty of Limerick (1691)' (Ph.D. thesis,
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