The public buildings of early seventeenth-century Irish towns - churches, tholsels, and almshouses - have attracted dedicated scholarly enquiry. Predictably, much research has focussed on Dublin, for which the written and visual sources are the most ample. Here, Dublin Castle, the seat of English authority in Ireland, looms large, as do the city's two cathedrals. Taking a different tack, this paper considers the spaces of legal administration in the capital during the lord deputyship of Sir Arthur Chichester, who is shown to have had a decisive role in the renewal of the city's places of jurispudence while preserving its traditional spatial ties. The presentation also discusses the ceremonial and materiality of the 1613-15 parliament, which had convened at the castle but whose public presentation addressed the city - and, indeed, the kingdom - at large. The objectives of current and ongoing research about Chichester's architectural patronage shall also be outlined.

Dr Robin Usher is a graduate of TCD and Cambridge University, where he completed his PhD on 'Power, display, and the symbolic terrains of Protestant Dublin, c.1600-1760.' He has held research positions at Oxford University, Oxford Brookes University and TCD. He is a historian of British and Irish architecture, landscapes, and urban society 1580-1690, and has worked on several major digital humanities projects. His research interests include a study of the building projects of Sir Arthur Chichester, which requires extensive primary source research on plantation and urban settlement in early seventeenth-century Ulster. He is currently R.J. Hunter Digital Fellow in History, 2024-6, working on the Ulster Settlers Database project, a collaboration between the Royal Irish Academy, Maynooth University and QUB, under the direction of Prof Emerita Mary O'Dowd and Prof Tom O'Connor. His publications include Protestant Dublin, 1660-1760: architecture and iconography (2012).

This seminar will be in hybrid form. All welcome.