2025 Robert Crouse Memeorial Lecture

Dr Daniel Watson will deliver the 9th Annual Robert Crouse Memorial Lecture, “Secular Wisdom in Early Medieval Ireland: the Discovery of Alternate Authorities in the Uncanonical West ”, on January 12, 2025 at 7:00 p.m.

The lecture will be preceded by a Choral Evensong sung by the joined choirs of King’s College Chapel and St George’s Round Church, directed by Garth MacPhee. Evensong begins at 5:00 p.m.

This Year’s Lecture: This lecture will explore the ways that secular wisdom was distinguished from sacred wisdom in early medieval Irish literature from as early as the seventh century. Beyond this, it will discuss the pre-Christian Irish authorities which were presented as the basis for secular wisdom, and the way in which early Irish speculations in this area open up the (for us) hidden multiplicity of the broader learned traditions on which they draw.

The Lecturer: Dr Daniel Watson, BA (Trinity Western), MA (Dal), PhD (Maynooth), is currently a Bergin Fellow in the School of Celtic Studies at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies in Dublin, Ireland. His PhD research was concerned with the patristic mediation of philosophical ideas to medieval Ireland, with a focus on the way such ideas were taken up and transformed in early Irish saga and law texts. Dr Watson’s many research interests include the religious and intellectual culture of medieval Ireland and Scotland, medieval Irish saga, medieval Irish law, Neoplatonism, patristics, medieval philosophy and theology, theurgy/liturgy, mythology and mythography, metaphysics, cosmology, theories of interpretation, and historiography.

The Lecture Series: The Robert Crouse Memorial Lecture was founded in 2016 in honour of the Rev’d Dr. Robert Darwin Crouse – scholar, priest and organist, whose dies natalis is 15 January, 2011. Dr. Crouse lectured in FYP on Dante’s “Divine Comedy” for decades from October 1972 onwards.

Through his renowned sermons, great learning, and gentle humility, Fr. Crouse educated and inspired a whole generation of priests, bishops, and academics, who are now serving in dioceses and universities throughout Canada, the United States, and Europe. An organist and harpsichordist, in the early 1970s Dr. Crouse established the current choir at King’s whose execution of both polyphony and plainchant continues to enhance and shape the poetic liturgy of the King’s Chapel. His writings and his love for the medieval Italian poet, Dante, continue to powerfully shape the personal and intellectual formation of students at the University of King’s College and its Chapel.