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Uncovers a vibrant literary culture often overlooked by colonial historiography and Anglocentric critical traditions. Reimagines Spenser's Munster through multilingual networks, bardic poetry, and digital methodologies.
Long dominated by Anglocentric narratives, early modern literary studies have often cast Ireland as a backdrop to English self-fashioning. This volume reorients that perspective by foregrounding the multilingual, polyvocal literary culture of Munster in the late sixteenth century, situating Edmund Spenser not as an isolated colonial voice but as one writer among many-Gaelic, Old English, and New English-engaged in a contested cultural landscape. Drawing on archival, digital, and geospatial methodologies, the essays presented here explore bardic poetry, deep mapping, and the politics of language in texts by and about Spenser and his contemporaries. Case studies of bardic poetry, manuscript culture, and poetic networks reveal a vibrant and dynamic Gaelic literary tradition that responded to colonial violence.
By integrating perspectives from Irish-language literature, English studies, and digital humanities, this collection offers a vital corrective to monolingual historiographies and opens new pathways for understanding the cultural entanglements of Spenser's Munster. It reconceptualises the idea of Spenser in Ireland by highlighting the region's cultural complexity and multilingualism, demonstrating how attention to this richness deepens our understanding of one of the most fraught and fateful periods in the shared history of Ireland and England.
Long dominated by Anglocentric narratives, early modern literary studies have often cast Ireland as a backdrop to English self-fashioning. This volume reorients that perspective by foregrounding the multilingual, polyvocal literary culture of Munster in the late sixteenth century, situating Edmund Spenser not as an isolated colonial voice but as one writer among many-Gaelic, Old English, and New English-engaged in a contested cultural landscape. Drawing on archival, digital, and geospatial methodologies, the essays presented here explore bardic poetry, deep mapping, and the politics of language in texts by and about Spenser and his contemporaries. Case studies of bardic poetry, manuscript culture, and poetic networks reveal a vibrant and dynamic Gaelic literary tradition that responded to colonial violence.
By integrating perspectives from Irish-language literature, English studies, and digital humanities, this collection offers a vital corrective to monolingual historiographies and opens new pathways for understanding the cultural entanglements of Spenser's Munster. It reconceptualises the idea of Spenser in Ireland by highlighting the region's cultural complexity and multilingualism, demonstrating how attention to this richness deepens our understanding of one of the most fraught and fateful periods in the shared history of Ireland and England.
Price: $120.00
Pages: 244
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer Inc.
Imprint: D.S.Brewer
Publication Date:
24 February 2026
Trim Size: 9.21 X 6.14 in
ISBN: 9781843847083
Format: Hardcover
BISACs:
LITERARY CRITICISM / Renaissance, Literary studies: c 1400 to c 1600, LITERARY CRITICISM / European / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh, POETRY / European / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh
List of Illustrations
List of Contributors
Acknowledgements
List of Abbreviations
Introduction
Evan Bourke, Deirdre Nic Chárthaigh, and Philip Mac a' Ghoill
Part 1: Coming into View
1 Counting Ears with Cats' Eyes: The Inconvenient Truth of A View
Patricia Palmer
2 Spenser in Munster: A Digital View
Evan Bourke
3 Bardic Motifs, Pedigrees and Political Thought: Pursuing Message and Audience Post MACMORRIS
Brendan Kane and Evan Bourke
Part 2: The Gaelic View
4 Truagh tír gan tighearna: Two Poems on the Death of Tadhg Mac Carthaigh, Baron of Valentia († c.1587)
Deirdre Nic Chárthaigh
5 The Poems of Domhnall (mac Dáire) Mac Bruaideadha
Eoghan Ó Raghallaigh
6 Sealbh na críche is ceart dá fhréimh: The Poems of Domhnall Ó Dálaigh
Philip Mac a' Ghoill
7 Mil ar gach Mír: Eochaidh Ó hEódhusa as a Love Poet
Síle Ní Mhurchú
Coda
Evan Bourke
Index of First Lines of Bardic Poems
Bibliography
Index
List of Contributors
Acknowledgements
List of Abbreviations
Introduction
Evan Bourke, Deirdre Nic Chárthaigh, and Philip Mac a' Ghoill
Part 1: Coming into View
1 Counting Ears with Cats' Eyes: The Inconvenient Truth of A View
Patricia Palmer
2 Spenser in Munster: A Digital View
Evan Bourke
3 Bardic Motifs, Pedigrees and Political Thought: Pursuing Message and Audience Post MACMORRIS
Brendan Kane and Evan Bourke
Part 2: The Gaelic View
4 Truagh tír gan tighearna: Two Poems on the Death of Tadhg Mac Carthaigh, Baron of Valentia († c.1587)
Deirdre Nic Chárthaigh
5 The Poems of Domhnall (mac Dáire) Mac Bruaideadha
Eoghan Ó Raghallaigh
6 Sealbh na críche is ceart dá fhréimh: The Poems of Domhnall Ó Dálaigh
Philip Mac a' Ghoill
7 Mil ar gach Mír: Eochaidh Ó hEódhusa as a Love Poet
Síle Ní Mhurchú
Coda
Evan Bourke
Index of First Lines of Bardic Poems
Bibliography
Index