They were priests and confessors, intellectuals and chroniclers, civil engineers and medical practitioners, who were deeply interested in the world around them. The friars mined a rich vein of urban and rural benefaction throughout their 400 year history in Kilkenny and members of their community rose to the highest echelons of the medieval Irish hierarchy. This paper seeks to exploit these sources by presenting a fresh synthesis of the materials, some of which have not been accessed for well in excess of a century, to illuminate the intersecting social, intellectual and physical worlds of Kilkenny's medieval Franciscans. However, the fortuitous survival of primary source materials within various repositories, historically situated at Kilkenny, offers a research path to explore the worlds inhabited by Kilkenny's Conventual Franciscans, present in the town between c. This paucity of written records, and of extant built-fabric, has contributed to the lack of scholarly attention given to the medieval Irish Conventual Franciscans, especially when compared with their Observant confrères. Additionally, since the Conventuals were, for the most part, confined to the Anglo-Norman parts of Ireland, their friaries were among the first to be dissolved during the sixteenth-century Irish suppression campaign, leading to the dismantlement and reconfiguration of their ecclesiastical precincts. By the early seventeenth century, almost all of the archival and documentary records of the Irish Conventual Franciscans were lost.
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