Clodagh Finn: The dung queen of Ireland — and other Irish women alive in the time of Hamnet

Voices is using AI and Knowledge Graph technologies to bring together myriad sources so historians and computer scientists can recover the lives of ordinary Irish early modern women

Dr Daniel Patterson, Prof Jane Ohlmeyer and Dr Bronagh McShane in the National Archives of Ireland viewing records from the Court of Chancery as part of the Voices project, which brings together historians and computer scientists to recover the lives of early modern women in Ireland. 

Strong by name, formidable by nature. The business acumen, wiles and entrepreneurial genius of Catherine Strong, aka the dung queen of Ireland, seem very modern, but this woman who cleared animal and human waste off the streets of Dublin was working more than four centuries ago.

The capital’s “scavenger”, to use her official title, was at the height of her powers around the same time Agnes (or Anne) Hathaway and her husband Shakespeare were grieving the loss of their only son Hamnet, a personal tragedy returned so poignantly to the spotlight in Chloé Zhao’s Bafta-winning film.