Rokeby Lecture 2025 | The Other Bishop’s Library: Thomas Percy’s Books, Ballads, Elks and Pikes

The Rokeby Lecture 2025, The Other Bishop’s Library: Thomas Percy’s Books, Ballads, Elks and Pikes, by Dr Frank Ferguson, will be held on the first day of the Georgian Festival, Thursday 27 November 2025.

In this talk, Dr Ferguson will explore the impact of Bishop Thomas Percy of Dromore, County Down. History has not been kind to Percy. He has not enjoyed the same renown as Archbishop Robinson of Armagh or Bishop Hervey of Downhill. However, it could be argued that Percy’s literary endeavours as collector, editor and patron shaped the cultural landscape of Ireland and Britain in multiple and profound ways.

Frank Ferguson will suggest that Percy’s work and approach, set amid a time of political upheaval in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century in Ireland, offered a means to use song and poetry as a means to find common ground, religious tolerance and reconciliation.

Frank Ferguson is the Research Director for English Language and Literature at Ulster University. An experienced researcher in Irish literary studies, he has written and edited a number of publications on Irish and Northern Irish literature including, Ulster-Scots Writing, an Anthology, (Four Courts, 2008) Revising Robert Burns and Ulster: literature, religion and politics, c.1770-1920 (Four Courts 2009) John Hewitt, A North Light (Four Courts, 2013. He is the editor of Balancing Acts: Conversations with Gerald Dawe on a Life in Poetry (Irish Academic Press 2023). He has managed a number of major projects on Irish writing. He is the current Chair of the John Hewitt Society, a Governor of the Linen Hall Library and a Committee Member of the Ulster-Scots Broadcast Fund.