The Jennifer O'Reilly Digital Archive
The ‘Jennifer O'Reilly Research Data Archive’, hosted by The Digital Repository of Ireland (DRI), can be accessed here: https://doi.org/10.7486/DRI.hm517n198.
The entirety of Dr O’Reilly’s digital archive consists of approximately 65,000 files, a small portion of which was selected and arranged thematically into 11 subcollections on various aspects of Jennifer’s research and teaching on the writings of the Venerable Bede.
Tom O’Reilly, as the executor of his mother’s literary estate, worked with Dr Elizabeth Mullins of University College Dublin to arrange and select from those materials the files that would give insight into Jennifer’s associated research as well as share her approach to teaching the subject matter. The collection thus provides a key to understanding many of Dr O’Reilly’s complex publications, and, significantly, offers insight into her research processes, sources and analytical methods underpinning an authoritative history of early medieval texts and images.
These textual research files, created between 2000 and 2016, clearly demonstrate Dr O’Reilly’s method of working which involved tracing the interpretation of Biblical images from the earliest Greek and Latin commentators, through to their reception by Bede and other Insular writers in the medieval period. They were uploaded to the Repository as originally created, and can be used and edited as document files. PDF copies of the files are also available, as generated by the Repository to preserve the look and formatting in the original files over time.
The collection is openly available for educational reuse with attribution, and further materials from the archive may be made available upon request from the estate.