Trinity College’s new sculpture: 30 women to put on a pedestal

It has been more than 200 years coming, but better late than never: the provost of Trinity College Dublin wants the first woman to join the 40 men memorialised in marble busts in the Long Room of the Old Library. 

Patrick Prendergast has asked for nominations for who should sit alongside Aristotle, Isaac Newton, Edmund Burke and Jonathan Swift, among others. The woman needn’t have a Trinity connection nor be Irish, just be a scholar who is no longer alive. 

To get the ball rolling, here are 30 Irish scholars, writers and thinkers worth considering for the honour. 

read more here @ Irish Times

Patricia Crawford

From The Age:

Patricia Crawford, a pioneering historian and author whose seminal work in revealing fresh insights into 17th-century England won her the Royal Historical Society's prestigious Whitfield prize in 1979, has died in Western Australia after an eight-year battle with breast cancer. She was 68.

Crawford, emeritus professor of history at the University of Western Australia's school of humanities, illuminated life in that extraordinary period — in particular women in 16th and 17th century England— and opened up a whole new field of investigation and revelation from archival documents.

There was almost nothing in print about women of that period when she started writing on the subject in 1980; now, almost every aspect of ordinary women's lives has been written about, and in many cases, the groundwork was done by Crawford.