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Representations of Women in Some Early Modern English Tracts on the Colonization of Ireland*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 July 2014

Clare Carroll
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Extract

Since D. B. Quinn's The Elizabethans and the Irish, the history of early modern Ireland has been the subject of a wide range of studies, but only recently has women's role in that history received attention. Similarly, Nicholas Canny's article on “Edmund Spenser and the Development of an Anglo-Irish Identity” initiated a debate about whether sixteenth-century tracts on Ireland express a unified colonialist ideology, but only recently has the construction of sexuality in these texts come under scrutiny. It is not surprising that those who study the history of women in early modern Ireland do not often turn to the English tracts for evidence, except with great caution and reservation. So much related in these documents is indebted to the stereotypes of a colonialist discourse, initiated by Giraldus Cambrensis in the twelfth century, rather than to observation or encounter. Recent work on the history of women in early modern Ireland presents us with a sense of what is not being represented in the English settlers' descriptions. Such aspects of women's lives in Gaelic Ireland as their right to hold and acquire their own land and to keep their own names while married are not referred to in these tracts. These tracts do not yield transparent information about actual Irish women of the period, although there are fascinating references to their activities. Spenser writes that Irish women had “the trust and care of all things both at home and in the fields.” And at least one woman, the foster mother of Murrogh O'Brien, is said to have drunk the blood of her child's head as she grieved when he had been drawn and quartered by the English. The character of these texts as colonialist discourse makes the representation of women as a symbolic category or “gender” the more useful focus rather than some unmediated sense of “women.”

Type
Research Article
Information
Albion , Volume 25 , Issue 3 , Fall 1993 , pp. 379 - 393
Copyright
Copyright © North American Conference on British Studies 1993

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Footnotes

*

I would like to thank Betty Travitsky and the members of the Society for the Study of Women in the Renaissance for their responses to a version of this paper that I presented to our seminar at the CUNY Graduate Center.

References

1 Quinn, David Beers, The Elizabethans and the Irish (Ithaca, 1966)Google Scholar. Among important books on early modern Ireland are: Canny, Nicholas, The Elizabethan Conquest of Ireland: A Pattern Established 1565–76 (New York, 1976)Google Scholar; Moody, T. W., Martin, F. X., and Byrne, F. J., A New History of Ireland: Vol 111: Early Modern Ireland 1534–1691 (Oxford, 1976)Google Scholar; Edwards, Dudley, Ireland in the Age of the Tudors (New York, 1977)Google Scholar; Bradshaw, Brendan, The Irish Constitutional Revolution of the Sixteenth-Century (Cambridge, 1979)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ellis, Steven G., Tudor Ireland (London, 1985)Google Scholar. On Irish women of this period, see MacCurtain, Margaret and O'Dowd, Mary, eds., Women in Early Modern Ireland (Dublin, 1991)Google Scholar.

2 For the debate, see Canny, Nicholas, “Edmund Spenser and the Development of an Anglo-Irish Identity,” Yearbook of English Studies 13 (1983): 1–19CrossRefGoogle Scholar; idem, “Debate: Spenser's Irish Crisis: Humanism and Experience in the 1590's,” Past and Present 120 (1988): 201–09; Ciaran Brady, “Spenser's Irish Crisis: Humanism and Experience in the 1590's,” ibid. III (1986): 16–49; idem, “Reply to Nicholas Canny,” ibid. 120 (1988): 210–15; Bradshaw, Brendan, “Robe and Sword in the Conquest of Ireland,” in Law and Government under the Tudors, ed. Cross, Claire, et al (Cambridge, 1988)Google Scholar; and Coughlan, Patricia, ed., Spenser and Ireland (Cork, 1989)Google Scholar. On gender in the tracts: Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass, “Dismantling Irena: The Sexualizing of Ireland in Early Modern England,” in Nationalisms and Sexualities, ed. Andrew Parker, et. al (New York, 1992), pp. 157–71.

3 Cambrensis, Giraldus, Topographia Hibernia in Giraldi Cambrensis Opera, vol. 5, ed. Dimock, J. F. (Rolls Series, 1867)Google Scholar. For the effects of these stereotypes on English writing on Ireland see: Laurence, Anne, “The Cradle to the Grave: English Observations of Irish Social Customs in the Seventeenth Century,” Seventeenth Century 3, 1 (1988): 63–84Google Scholar.

4 Spenser, Edmund, A View of the Present State of Ireland, ed. Renwick, W. L. (Oxford, 1970), p. 61Google Scholar (hereafter cited as A View).

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6 See Greenblatt's, Steven chapter on Spenser in Renaissance Self-Fashioning (Chicago, 1980)Google Scholar; and my own “The Construction of Gender, Class and the Political Other in Faerie Queene 5 and A View of the Present State of Ireland,” Criticism 32 (Spring 1990): 163–92Google Scholar.

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8 Other Old English tracts include: SirWalsh, Nicholas, The Office and Duety in Fighting for Our Country (London, 1545)Google Scholar; Quinn, D. B., ed., “Conjectures on the State of Ireland, 1552,” Irish Historical Studies 5 (1947): 303–22CrossRefGoogle Scholar; White, Rowland, “‘Discourse Touching Ireland’ c. 1569,” ed. Canny, Nicholas, Irish Historical Studies 20 (1976–1977): 439–63Google Scholar.

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11 Spenser, A View, p. 66.

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26 Ibid., pp. 51–52.

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29 Riche, Barnabe, My Ladies Looking Glasse (London, 1615)Google Scholar. Barbara Bowen and Susan Gushee O'Malley introduced me to this text, which will appear in their forthcoming edition of tracts on women.

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31 Riche, , My Ladies Looking Glasse, p. 52Google Scholar.

32 Spenser, , A View, p. 53Google Scholar.

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37 Beacon, Richard, Solon His Follie, or A Politique Discourse, Touching the Reformation of common-weales conquered, declined or corrupted (Oxford, 1594)Google Scholar; “The Epistle Dedicatorie,” 3r. Vincent Carey and I are editing this text for Medieval and Renaissance Texts & Studies.

38 Beacon, Solon His Follie, “The booke vnto the Reader,” jv.

39 SirDavies, John, “A Discovery of the True Causes Why Ireland Was Never Entirely Subdued,” in Ireland Under Elizabeth and James the First, ed. Morley, Henry (London, 1890), p. 247Google Scholar (hereafter cited as “A Discovery”).

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44 Ibid., p. 105.

45 Ibid., p. 106.

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48 “The booke unto the Reader,” jv.

49 Stanyhurst, , “Description of Ireland,” p. 69Google Scholar.

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51 Beacon, , Solon, pp. 3–4Google Scholar.

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53 See Strong, Roy, The Cult of Elizabeth (Berkeley, 1977), pp. 46–50Google Scholar, for description of Elizabeth as a type of Diana-Venus.

54 King, John, Tudor Royal Iconography: Literature and Art in an Age of Religious Crisis (Princeton, 1989), pl. 11a, pp. 182–267Google Scholar.

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