This essay explores overlapping and intersecting modes of communicative interchange which characterised Gaelic cultural expression in the long early modern period. For a variety of complex reasons, print failed to supplant script as a communicative mode in Irish until arguably late in the nineteenth century and early in the twentieth century. Accordingly, the present essay seeks to delineate an often elusive but nonetheless intellectually dynamic encounter between print technology and communication in Irish down to the nineteenth century. Given the potent cultural and historical resonance of Gaelic script, it is argued that early modern Gaelic Protestants were acutely attentive to the ideological implications of an alignment of venerable scribal practice with print technology in the presentation of a new and radical religious programme. It is proposed that a vibrant Gaelic scribal culture was informed and energised by a creative confluence of script, print, and orality.

The literature of Ireland in the period covered by this chapter is characterized by a remarkable intellectual and artistic diversity shaped by a dynamic and not infrequently tense interaction between Gaelic, English and French cultures. Indeed such is the varied composition of the ethnic cultures of later medieval Ireland that discussion of the contemporary literature within a specific insular framework risks disregarding the diffuse and permeable boundaries of cultural expression. While literatures in French and English produced in Ireland constitute a local expression of vibrant metropolitan cultures, the ideological and aesthetic focus of the majority culture of the Irish-speaking population was centred on the island itself. Even in the case of Irish Gaelic culture, however, its reach and influence extended to the Gaelic-speaking regions of western and northern Scotland. Conscious of the strikingly modern cultural resonances of this obscured and little-known phase in Ireland’s literary history, the present chapter seeks to explore the development of writing in both prose and poetry in Irish and other languages within an inclusive framework of analysis. The literature of later medieval Ireland provides vivid testimony for contemporary ideological, social and religious beliefs; but perhaps more strikingly and affectingly, it provides a rare and valuable insight into the world-view and varied human emotions of the late medieval Irish literati and the men and women for whom they composed.

In her innovative study of religion and sectarian controversy in Ireland during the period 1400–1690, Samantha Meigs argues that the Gaelic literati played a pivotal role in the transmission and dissemination of a traditional Gaelic religious sensibility which effectively predetermined the failure of the Protestant reformation in Gaelic Ireland. While other European countries obviously had their scholarly elites, she suggests that none of these matched the influence which the Gaelic literati brought to bear on communal devotional experience in Ireland. Discerning a broad professional alliance, Meigs maintains that teachers, scribes, historians, jurists, physicians and high poets combined to form a particularly influential ‘bardic’ order to which she applies the collective term aos dána. This diverse group was, she claims, characterised by a shared corporate identity which was shaped by a common intellectual formation and frequently distinguished by reason of kinship ties. Significantly, because their training was influenced by an amalgam of Christian monastic and Gaelic cultural influences, Meigs portrays agents of this so-called bardic order as integrating both Gaelic and Latin learning while simultaneously mediating between written and oral cultures. Accordingly, although the aos dána occupied an elite social niche, its members also functioned as the purveyors of popular culture. Apparently the ‘linchpin of Irish society’, it seems that when Meigs' proposed combined bardic order moved to reject the Protestant reformation and consciously aligned itself with the counter-reformation church, its members collectively sealed the fate of Protestant evangelical ambitions in Ireland and imparted an enduring and distinctively Gaelic bardic ethos to Irish religion in the early modern period and beyond.

This chapter is intended to outline and explore aspects of the evolution of Irish nationality and consciousness during the reigns of Elizabeth I and James I. It concludes with a consideration of why the implications of such a development pre-empted the possibility of an easy incorporation of the Irish within an overarching British identity, as successfully undertaken in Wales where the English crown's reforming initiatives over the same period encountered conditions in a Celtic fringe territory in many ways similar to those in the neighbouring island. It spans a period encompassing a process of critical political and social change in Ireland. In a country dominated by regional and localised potentates, and thus lacking an indigenous centralised political structure, it is tempting to infer a corresponding absence of a common political culture, ideology and mode of discourse. Paradoxically, however, the diffused nature of political organisation was counterbalanced by the homogeneity of elite Gaelic culture. The island, with the effective exception of the Pale area in and around the city of Dublin, was characterised by the centuries old and highly refined modes of Gaelic civilisation. Indeed, this Gaelic cultural ambience was not simply an insular phenomenon but extended from the Scottish Hebrides to the southern extremities of Ireland. When the Tudor monarchs began an ultimately cumulative drive to assert hegemony over the quasi-autonomous neighbouring island, they confronted an ancient and sophisticated culture which bound together the decentralised power bases of Ireland. Gaelic cultural dominance was highlighted by the effective acculturation of the descendants of the twelfth-century Anglo-Norman settlers, particularly those beyond the Pale.