Accounts of early modern Irish literature can have the peculiar effect of situating the Irish on the margins of their own story. The language shift from Irish to English was one of the most dramatic results of the Elizabethan conquest – but, in the 1500s and early 1600s, English had a bare toehold in Ireland. True, some major works of the English Renaissance were written in Ireland. Edmund Spenser composed The Faerie Queene in a planter castle in North Cork. Sir George Carew turned Ercilla’s La Araucana (the Spanish epic of the conquest of Chile) into a military handbook directed at defeating the Irish. Sir John Harington translated Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso in the interval between his two colonial adventures in Ireland. But to focus only on the culture of the newcomers is to ignore the rich and dominant culture of Gaelic and Gaelicised Ireland, as well as the vibrant English-language culture of the Pale. This lecture explores how we might recapture the full complexity of Renaissance Ireland. It introduces the MACMORRIS project, a four-year project funded by the Irish Research Council, which will map all the cultural players, working across cultures and languages, in the years when Ireland made its convulsive entry into modernity.
The lecture will take place at 6.30pm Thursday 9 May in JH4, followed by a reception