Second paragraph of third chapter (‘The name of the country I have forgotten’ – remembering and dismembering in Sir Henry Sidney’s Irish Memoir (1583), by Willy Maley) – this is a long one!
In recent years, with the advent of the new historicism, local and topographical readings of early modern Ireland have been supplanted by more theoretically sophisticated work on mapping.⁵ This refinement of the relationship between literary culture and geographical understanding has been accompanied br a questioning of the extent to which accurate depiction of place was an essential prerequisite for conquest and colonization.⁶ Maps have gaps, just like texts, and their silences may be as eloquent as their inclusions.⁷ Perhaps the most famous mapping moment, the most remarkable unfolding of a chart in Renaissance literature outside of King Lear, is Spenser’s View of the Present State of Ireland (1596), when Eudoxus interrupts Irenius to say:
I see now all your men bestowed, but what places would you set their garrison that they might rise out most conveniently to service? and though perhaps I am ignorant of the places, yet I will take the mappe of Ireland before me, and lay it before me, and make mine eyes (in the meane time) my schoole-masters, to guide my understanding to judge of your plot.⁸
⁵ R.B. Gottfried’s ‘Irish geography in Spenser’s View‘, English Literary History, 6 (1939), 114-37, is an example of the earlier tradition. The recent criticism includes Bruce Avery, ‘Mapping the Irish Other: Spenser’s A view of the present state of Ireland, English Literary History, 57:2 (1990), 263-79; David Baker’s ‘Off the map: charting uncertainty in Renaissance Ireland’ in Brendan Bradshaw, Andrew Hadfield & Willy Maley (eds), Representing Ireland: literature and the origins of conflict, 1534-1660 (Cambridge, 1993), 76-92; Bernhard Klein’s ‘English cartographers and the mapping of Ireland in the early modern period’, Journal for the Study of British Cultures, 2:2 (1995), 115-39; Julia Lupton’s ‘Mapping mutability: or, Spenser’s Irish plot’ in Bradshaw et al. (eds), Representing Ireland, 93-115; and Joanne Woolway Grenfell, ‘Significant spaces in Edmund Spenser’s View of the present state of Ireland,’ Early Modern Literary Studies, 4:2, Special Issue 3 (September 1998), 6:1-21 URL:http://purl.oclc.org/ emis/04-2/woolsign.htm.
⁶ Peter Barber is among those who have questioned the obsession with cartographic evidence in reading the culture of the early modern period See ‘Was Elizabeth interested in maps – and did it matter?”, TRHS, 14 (2004), 185-98
⁷ J.B. Harley has argued along these lines in ‘Silences and secrecy: the hidden agenda of cartography in early modern Europe’, Imago Mundi, 40 (1988), 57-76. I am grateful to Thomas Herron for this reference. While I have some sympathy for Harley’s position, and find his use of Foucault persuasive, I am also partial to Foucault’s distinction between the ‘repressive hypothesis’ and an ‘incitement to discourse’. See ‘We “other” Elizabethans’, the introduction to Willy Maley, Salvaging Spenser: colonialism, culture and identity (Basingstoke, 1997), 1-10. I come closer to Harley in my ‘Forms of discrimination in Spenser’s A view of the state of Ireland (1596; 1633): from dialogue to silence’ in Willy Maley, Nation, state and empire in English Renaissance literature: Shakespeare to Milton (Basingstoke, 2003), pp 63-91. Cartography in a colonial context carries many dangers. Sir John Davies, writing to the privy council on 28 August 1609, reported the fate of a mapmaker in Ulster, where ‘the enhabitants tooke of his head, by cause they wouid not have their cuntrey discovered’. Cited in Brendan Bradshaw, Andrew Hadfield & Willy Maley (eds), Representing Ireland; literature and the origins of conflict, 1534-1660 (Cambridge, 1993), 13.
⁸ Andrew Hadfield & Willy Maley (eds), Edmund Spenser, A view of the state of Ireland (1633): from the first printed edition (Oxford & Malden, 1997), p. 96. All subsequent references are to this edition by page number in the text.
I’m still hoping to get around to my project on Irish history in the Tudor period at some point, and I will really not complain if that aspiration sometimes leads me to read brilliant books such as this.
There are sixteen substantial essays here, with an introduction by co-editor Herron, and none of them is a dud, which is really unusual for any book with separately commissioned pieces by that many authors. All of them address the proposition that there are many interesting things to say about Ireland and the Renaissance, two words that are not often used in the same sentence.
Eight of the chapters are about learning and literature (including one about the Counter-Reformation). Topics covered include the teacher Peter White (who I suspect may have been a distant relative of my family), Sir Henry Sidney of course, and the contemporary literary treatment of the glamorous Thomas Stukley.
Six chapters then look at artefacts, mostly architecture – the front cover features Sir Walter Ralegh’s place in County Cork, which still survives as a private residence! – with a bit of art as well, including Bartlett’s maps of the Nine Years War. The standout chapter for me was on the bridge at Athlone constructed by Sir Henry Sidney and demolished in 1844, or rather on the sculptures and inscriptions that adorned it.
Two final chapters examine the personal accounts of two aristocratic women who unsuccessfully defended their castles in 1641, and the celebrations in Dublin of the restoration of Charles II twenty years later. (Your regular reminder that the first recorded Indian immigrant to Ireland was burned out of his home by Irish nationalists.)
One last comment – this is a particularly heavy book, with lovely plates and illustrations, well produced from Four Courts Press. It will last for the ages. A grim comparison with the previous book I finished, Not So Quiet… by Helen Zenna Smith.
You can get it here.
This was the non-fiction book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves. Next on that list is The Making of Martin Luther, by Richard Rex.
