14/02/2023
Such beautiful shoes!
vol.103 (week 07/23): National Museum of Ireland Dublin (IE)
This week in TurnshoeTuesday, we present you a second museum in Dublin (remember TurnshoeTuesday #89, whe we presented the Dublinia museum?) - and this one is a bit bigger as we take a closer look at the National Museum of Ireland. This museum covers many topics, among them archaeology of the Viking Age in Ireland – which of course includes a couple of shoe finds on display.
The museum
For a short overview of Dublin's medieval history, see our previous article TurnshoeTuesday #89 here: https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=408423578163923&set=a.2355509474594899.
The National Museum of Ireland (https://www.museum.ie/en-ie/home) as based on the heritage of a number of Dublin organizations of the 18th and 19th century, with the oldest parts (mostly mineralogy and geology) being collected and made accessible to the public by the Royal Dublin Society in 1792.. Other parts of the museum stem from the collections of the Royal Irish Academy and the Museum of Irish Industry. The name „National Museum of Ireland“ was first used in 1832, but only became regular after Irish Independence 1921; before the museum was known as „Science and Art Museum“ (since 1877) or similar.
Today, the museum consists of departments for Decorative Arts & History, Country Life, Natural History and Archaeology, which are located in different buildings. Our picture shows the location in Kildare Street, where the Archaeology department sits in a building that was erected for this purpose in 1890.
The collections of the Archeology department contain artifacts from stone Age through Post Medieval; the permanent exhibitions consist of Ancient Egypt, Viking Ireland, Medieval Ireland 1150-1550 (including more than 800 objects), the treasury and many more – and as a latest addition since 2020, a department on the monastic site of Glendalough. Temporary exhibitions round up the portfolio.
Shoes in the museum
Inside the museum, there is one very interesting early medieval shoe on display in the small exhibition area „Glendalough – Power, Prayer & Pilgrimage“ (which was opened in 2020). The shoe (lower row, central shoe in our image) is dated 899-1033 AD. This heavily worn shoe is made from one piece of leather (including the sole) which is contrary t the turnshoes of the high and late middle ages which usually consist of a separate sole and uppers.
The permanent exhibition about Viking Age Ireland presents a selection of medieval shoes, as can be seen in our overview pictures in the upper row. This includes two examples of shoes from the 9th and 10th centuries (center row, left image).
Other early medieval shoes in the museum's permanent exhibition are featured in a display about wetland finds, where an early medieval decorated leather shoe from a bog in Carrigallen (central row, central picture) and an early medieval waistband shoe type from a bog in Coolatoor (lower row, left picture) can be visited here. A very special example can also be found here in this display – a boot for the use in the wetlands made of a combination of wooden lower shoe part and leather shaft (lower row, right image). It was found in a bog in Clonsast. The museum labels this as „probably late medieval“.
If you have better pictures of these shoes, your help would be welcome. Also, there seem to be more shoes on display also from the late Middle Ages and beyond – if any of our readers has information on these, please contact us. There are even more shoes attributed to the National Museum of Ireland to be found on Pinterest, see links below, but we could not confirm these sources.
An exotic artifact in the museum's collection about Medieval Ireland is St Brigid's shoe shrine (central row, right image). St Brigid being one of the three Irish Patron Saints, her shoes soon became relics – and the shoe shrine is a reliquiary for these shoes, made from a copper alloy. As the shoe depicted here consists of two parts, it is not to be from the early medieval period, but was made in 1410 according to the inscription.
The museum holds more medieval shoes in their collection, as can be seen in the Celtic shoes blog linked below.
Finally, the shoes presented back in TurnshoeTuesday #89 in Dublinia Museum actually come from the National Museum of Ireland (see: https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=408423578163923&set=a.2355509474594899).
Digital offers and further research
The museum has a couple of online presentations here in this section: https://www.museum.ie/en-IE/Collections-Research/Online-Galleries/Online-Galleries . Especially for the Viking Age, the museum offers a virtual tour of the exhibition here: https://www.museum.ie/en-IE/Museums/Archaeology/Exhibitions/Viking-Ireland.
A nice overview video of the archeological collection can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jOZrTR8MmdE and here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FHcSt8bryiE .
Great details about the shoes on display and in the museum's collection can be found here on the page of Celtic Shoes: http://www.celticshoes.ie/aboutcelticshoes.html, especially about the Dublin shoes in this picture here: http://www.celticshoes.ie/uploads/2/0/0/7/20074727/16_orig.jpg.
Details about the shoe in the Glendalough exhibition can be found here: https://www.museum.ie/en-IE/Collections-Research/Collection/Glendalough-Power,-Prayer-Pilgrimage/Artefact/Leather-shoe/b196d999-2ebb-47f4-9eae-b3883eec8178 . It was also featured here on the museum's page: https://www.facebook.com/nationalmuseumofireland/photos/a.125306660068/10157395249845069 .
Further shoes can be found on Pinterest, but we could not confirm these sources yet: https://i.pinimg.com/originals/3a/94/b9/3a94b94b34fef5c2ce3f8414677e158f.jpg (14th century shoe alleged to the National Museum); also the famous Annaholty bog shoe might be held at the National Museum, but we are not sure about this (https://broguesandshoes.com/the-annaholty-bog-shoe-replica/ ).
Brigida's shoe shrine is described in detail here: https://www.museum.ie/en-IE/Museums/Archaeology/Engage-And-Learn/For-Adults/Online-Pop-Up-Talk-St-Brigid-s-Shoe-Shrine .
Beyond the listed links, some of the information about Dublin's and the museum's history is cited from the corresponding Wikipedia sites.
The picture of the museum is used under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license CC-BY-SA-4.0 by user Mike Peel from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:National_Museum_of_Ireland.jpg.
Literature
Joyce, Patrick Weston. A Smaller Social History of Ancient Ireland: treating of the government, military system, and law; religion, learning, and art; trades, industries, and commerce; manners, customs, and domestic life, of the ancient Irish people. Longmans, Green, & Company, 1908.
Dáire O'Rourke: First Steps in Medieval Footwear. Archaeology Ireland. 5.1: 1991
Marquita Volken. Archaeological Footwear: Development of Shoe Patterns and Styles from Prehistory Till the 1600's. Spa Uitgevers: 2014.
Last updated: 14.02.2023
Hint: The complete TurnshoeTuesday map can be found here:
https://www.google.com/maps/d/edit?mid=1M-CQxxbfVfh7GtlSsNhZa5MTteiI2Dbb&usp=sharing
