“Gnúis charthonach gan chailg n-aor:” Social Capital, Honor, and Gender in the Late Medieval Mág Uidhir Lordship of Fir Manach, c.1300-1650

This dissertation examines the cultural logic of honor in late medieval Gaelic Ireland. It argues that honor functioned not as an abstract moral virtue but as a form of social capital embedded in systems of kinship, gender, materiality, ethics, and embodiment. While traditional approaches to honor center masculine and martial ideals, this study reconsiders honor as moral economy that structured both social hierarchy and ethical obligation, with particular consideration given to the ways that gender, predominantly femininity, intersected that moral economy. Focusing on the Mág Uidhir lordship of Fir Manach (c.1300–1650), within the wider context of the Gaelic World, the study draws on Irish-language genealogies, annals, and bardic poetry to explore how honor was articulated, enacted, and exchanged. It employs a framework based on linguistic-anthropological pragmatics which is in turn informed by Pierre Bourdieu’s theories of social and symbolic capital, Marcel Mauss’s model of reciprocity, and Sherry Ortner’s reframing of culture within practice theory as a site of active strategy and participation rather than passive reproduction. Together, these frameworks allow Irish-language manuscripts to be read as spaces where social values were reified and contested through gendered ideas concerning embodiment, morality, and material exchange. It investigates the formulation of honor in late medieval Ireland through the exploration of three differing genres of medieval manuscript: genealogy, annals, and poetry. The genealogies illustrate how cultural attitudes can be revealed through naming practices and indexicality, or directionality, of a kinship term. The annals consistently evoked the lexicon of reputation and shame, illuminating the ways in which the historical memory of an individual was lionized or condemned in the historical record. Bardic poetry exposes the performative dimensions of praise and satire, where women’s reputations and bodies served as key sites through which social value was negotiated and moral order reinforced. Ultimately, this work frames honor as a mode of social capital that is both agentive and coercive, as a form of social responsibility.