Dublin’s Seventeenth Century Parishes and the Quality of Life

Abstract

The registers of Dublin’s parishes in the seventeenth century provide access to aspects of civic and religious life. In the registers are records of burials, marriages, christenings, and expenditures. The registers also record charitable acts such as the interment of the dead found on city streets and the care of abandoned children. Aggregated parish data provide an empirically based index of the comparative quality of parish life across the city, the P-QOL index.