We’re delighted to announce our February lunchtime lectures: ‘Of the Cloth: On the clothing of altars, monks & clergy’. 

A series of free lunchtime lectures will be held at Christ Church Cathedral in Dublin this February 2024 on Tuesdays at 1.10pm entitled ‘Of the Cloth’, which will examine all manner of ecclesiastical fabrics, from the dressing of altars to the robing of monks and clergy.

Speakers will include the art historian and textile conservator, Rachel Phelan who, on Tuesday 6 February, will take as her subject the Myerscough altar frontals at Kilternan and Christ Church cathedral and the links with the school of embroidery at St John’s Sandymount.

The following Tuesday 13 February, Brother Colmán Ó Clabaigh, a Benedictine monk of Glenstal abbey and a medievalist specialising in Irish monastic and religious history, will discuss medieval Irish ecclesiastical and liturgical vesture, and will be followed on Tuesday 20 February by the dean of Limerick, the Very Revd Niall Sloane, who will talk about post-Reformation clerical garb ranging from ruffs to gaiters.

The archdeacon of Armagh, the Venerable Dr Peter Thompson, will discuss the convergence of ecclesiastical and academic dress on Tuesday 27 February.

Admission is free, no pre-booking required, and all are most welcome. For further information, email the cathedral research advisor, Stuart Kinsella at ei.hcruhctsirhc@sevihcra.

The lecture series is generously supported by the Friends of Christ Church, and is the 33rd in a series which has run with some regularity for 27 years since the first on the Augustinian canons regular in October 1997. It takes up the baton from a series of memorial lectures for former dean’s verger, Joe Coady, which ran from 1987-2003, and which in turn recalls the annual St Stephen’s day lectures begun in 1891 by the cathedral architect, Sir Thomas Drew, which ran well into the 20th century.

Please note due to the historical nature of the building, this room is not wheelchair accessible.