Jennifer O'Reilly


Jennifer O'Reilly Fellow of the [Royal Society of Arts|FRSA] MRIA was a medieval historian of Britain and Ireland known for her work on text and image, the writings of Bede, and medieval iconography. She was married to the Irish scholar Terence O'Reilly.

Career

Jennifer O’Reilly received her B.A. Honours degree in history in 1964 from the University of Nottingham, followed by a Dip.Ed. from the Department of Education at the University of Oxford in 1965. She returned to Nottingham for her Ph.D in Art History, which was awarded in 1972. Subsequently, she taught at the University of St Andrews, before moving to University College Cork, where she worked until her retirement in 2008. She also had a prominent role in setting up the degree programme in History of Art at UCC.
Her monograph, Studies in the Iconography of the Virtues and Vices in the Middle Ages was published in 1988. A book of essays in her honour was published in 2011, 'Listen, o isles, unto me: studies in medieval word and image in honour of Jennifer O'Reilly'. In retirement she continued to publish extensively and gave the Jarrow Lecture and the Brixworth Lecture in 2014.
Three volumes of her collected essays were published by Routledge in 2019, edited by Diarmuid Scully, Máirín MacCarron, Carol Farr and Elizabeth Mullins, including both previous publications and formerly unpublished work. The first volume includes her work on Bede, Adomnán and Thomas Becket, and the second and third cover the Insular Gospel Books, the Codex Amiatinus, the Book of Kells and Anglo-Saxon Art.

Honours

Selected publications

  • ', eds. Diarmuid Scully and Máirín MacCarron
  • ', eds. Carol Farr and Elizabeth Mullins
  • , eds. Carol Farr and Elizabeth Mullins
  • ‘St Paul and the sign of Jonah. Theology and Scripture in Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica’,
  • ''Studies in the iconography of the Virtues and Vices in the Middle Ages''

The Jennifer O'Reilly Memorial Lecture series

An annual memorial lecture in honour of Jennifer O’Reilly was established in 2017 by the School of History at University College Cork.