The Impact of Mobility on the Imagination of Protestant Identity

Chapter 9 argues that practically the entire corpus of Irish Protestant writing of the seventeenth century is susceptible to a reading as migrant literature. It offers a series of brief case studies of particular authors and texts to demonstrate the ubiquity of migrant experience in shaping this literary production. The chapter concentrates in particular on Sir John Temple’s The Irish Rebellion, arguing that this became the ur-text of Protestant identity in Ireland, and highlights the manner in which this book gave an enduring voice to the displaced refugees of the 1641 rebellion. Other authors discussed include Andrew Stewart the Presbyterian historian, John Vesey, and his portrayal of John Bramhall, Sir James Ware, and James Ussher.

Wetnurse Politics in Spenser’s View and Jones’ Arte and Science

This essay places Edmund Spenser’s View of the Present State of Ireland (1596) into conversation with John Jones’ 1579 nursing manual Arte and Science in order to contextualize Spenser’s medical solution to Irish rebellion. For both, the Irish wetnurse, who controlled the political system of fosterage undermining England’s agenda in Ireland, is central to the corporate identity of a conjoined Anglo-Irish kingdom. A View’s relationship to Jones’ text reveals the vexed ontological landscape of England’s early imperial self-fashioning, which linked the re-engineering of the genetic nature of colonial bodies to the management of women’s reproductive labor.

Religion, civility and the ‘British’ of Ireland in the 1641 Irish rebellion

This article examines the 1641 Irish rebellion through a neglected manuscript account from 1643, written by Henry Jones and three of his 1641 deposition colleagues. The ‘Treatise’ offers important insights into the rebellion, but also advances a broader understanding of the significance of the early modern efforts to civilise Ireland and the impact of these schemes, especially plantation, on the kind of conflict that erupted in the 1640s. It is an evaluation that brings together both the long pre-history of the rebellion, and what eventually unfolded, offering new perspectives into a crucial and contested debate within modern historiography. The ‘Treatise’ also presents the opportunity to interrogate the position of the settler community, and their careful construction and presentation of a religiously- and culturally-driven improvement of the country. While it was a period of crisis, the rebellion offered an important opportunity to reflect on the wider project of Irish conversion and civility. It was a moment of creation and self-creation, as the emerging ‘British’ community not only digested the shock of the rebellion, but sought to fashion narratives that underlined their moral claims to Ireland on the grounds of true religion and civility.

“With a Knife at One’s Throat”

Padma Rangarajan, “‘With a Knife at One’s Throat’: Irish Terrorism in The O’Briens and the O’Flahertys” (pp. 294–317) Sydney Owenson, Lady Morgan’s The O’Briens and the O’Flahertys (1827) is a silver-fork novel edged in steel: a portrait of aristocratic 1790s Dublin society that doubles as anti-imperialist jeremiad. It is also one of the earliest pieces of fiction to explicitly identify terrorism as an inevitable consequence of colonial conquest. In this essay, I demonstrate how Morgan’s novel upends the standard definition of terrorism as a singular historical rift and rewrites it as a condition of life. Modernity has no chance in Ireland, Morgan argues, if the colonial parasitism of the past continues unabated. In The O’Briens and the O’Flahertys, Morgan prefigures Frantz Fanon’s diagnoses of the colonized psyche by carefully detailing the psychological and material effects of symbiotic terrorism—that is, terrorism as a complex network of reciprocal, mutually constitutive violent exchanges. Intertwining the thwarted legacy of the 1798 Irish Rebellion, the ongoing depredations of the Irish Ascendancy class, and her fears of an imminent revolution of the peasantry, Morgan mines Ireland’s near and distant past to forecast violence’s inevitable futurity.

National Identity and Satire

The eighteenth century was a period when ambitious Irish dramatists, particularly those based in London, deployed satire as a means of publicly displaying Irish improvement and Enlightenment. The Stage Irishman evolved over the period to become less an object than a tool of satire. Central to this process was new historiographical work by Irish historians that provided an ideological basis for this new drama. The Declaratory Act (1720) provoked Irish patriot writers; the failed Jacobite Rebellion (1745) offered them an opportunity to denigrate the Scottish to further Irish claims of Celtic authenticity; and the Irish rebellion (1798) muted the sense of possibility around the politics of national identity and satire.