Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Poetry and Water

If the coast and sea are to be more than settings for the play of literature, and if in doing so become the fabric of an aesthetic whose origins are in the interplay between water and land, then something more is to be read into art than a juxtaposition between fluidity and form. Liquidity is a condition of continual engagement, surface and depth, volume and elevation, are the dimensions of a literature that can hold a multiple consciousness in mind, the art work an astrolabe, not a map, its contours marked by soundings, its horizons by visions. This chapter reads the poetry of Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin in these contexts, following words and images from Acts and Monuments to the present. Ní Chuilleanáin is a central figure in contemporary Irish literature; associative and versatile, her work seeps around any reading of narrative enclosure.

A Journey through Time and Space in Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin’s “A Midwinter Prayer”

Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin often writes about journeys and quests, the focus in these poems is not on the destination but on the voyage itself. A poem called “A Midwinter Prayer,” first published in the poet’s 1972 collection, Acts and Monuments, depicts a journey that takes place not so much in space but rather in time. The poem spans not only a part of the year from Samhain to spring, but also takes the reader from pre-Christian times through the dawn of Christianity into the future of prophecies. This is achieved by an intricate system of allusions and interweaving of various subtexts that my essay aims to uncover. By mapping the references in this poem, this paper examines Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin’s strategic use of allusions and subtexts. The paper explores how allusions to different sources, like the Bible and old Irish literature and myth, are juxtaposed within a text. The article argues that allusions can become essential structural elements in the poet’s work and they can act as governing principles for entire poems. The aim of this paper is to analyse Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin’s complex allusive technique in one of her poems, “A Midwinter Prayer” in a way that will be applicable in later studies of the poet’s work.

From Protestant to Reformed

This chapter discusses the Reformed (or Calvinist) tradition. The Reformed tradition (or, alternatively, “Calvinism”) played a singular role in the making of the Reformation in England, Ireland, and Scotland and the development of New England. As early as the 1530s, Luther's theology, although available in translation, was giving way to connections direct and indirect with the Reformed international, connections nurtured by Thomas Cranmer, who became Archbishop of Canterbury in 1533. The chapter then looks at how the Reformed tradition was conveyed to British Protestants through books such as John Foxe's Acts and Monuments (1563 in English) and first-hand encounters with Reformed practice that happened in the 1550s during the reign of Mary Tudor (1553–58), when English and Scottish ministers—the “Marian exiles”—fled to the Continent. As Foxe and the martyrs whose faith he was documenting repeatedly declared, Catholicism was wrong because it was based on “human inventions” whereas their version of Christianity was restoring the “primitive” perfection of the apostolic church. The chapter also outlines how the Reformation in Scotland differed from the Reformation in England.

Cain’s Castles

In Chapter 1, the Reformation is presented as the paradigmatic site of Gothic escape: the evil monastery can be traced back to Wycliffe’s ‘Cain’s castles’ and the fictional abbey ruin to the Dissolution. Central Gothic tropes are shown to have their origin in this period: the Gothic heroine is compared to the female martyrs of Foxe’s Acts and Monuments; the usurper figure is linked to the papal Antichrist; and the element of continuation and the establishment of the true heir is related to Reformation historiography, which needs to prove that the Protestant Church is in continuity with early Christianity—this crisis of legitimacy is repeated in the Glorious Revolution. Lastly, Gothic uncovering of hypocrisy is allied to the revelation of Catholicism as idolatry. The Faerie Queene is interpreted as a mode of Protestant Gothic and Spenser’s Una provides an allegorical gesture of melancholic distance, which will be rendered productive in later Gothic fiction.

Bunyan’s Reading

The Bible is John Bunyan’s primary text, but the range of his reading, before and after his conversion experience, reveals some of the sources of his imaginative works as well as his pastoral and theological concerns. This chapter discusses, in turn, some of the key books in his intellectual and spiritual formation, including popular ballads, newsbooks, and romances; best-selling religious works by Lewis Bayly and Arthur Dent; Martin Luther’s commentary on Galatians; the terrifying story of the apostate Francis Spira; a treatise by Isaac Ambrose in which (it is claimed) he wrote marginal annotations; and John Foxe’s great ecclesiastical history, Acts and Monuments, a copy of which Bunyan had with him in prison, and to which he refers often in his writings.

Martyrologists without Boundaries: The Collaboration of John Foxe and Heinrich Pantaleon

Amid the great Protestant martyrologies of the mid-sixteenth century, Heinrich Pantaleon's Martyrvm historia (1563) has been comparatively overlooked. This article argues that Pantaleon's martyrology acted as a capstone to the narrative framework of Protestant suffering and resistance. Pantaleon's command of vernacular languages gave him access to a wider range of material than other martyrologists, material which his Latin text made accessible to learned readers across Europe. This article also examines the collaboration between Pantaleon and John Foxe, which directly inspired Pantaleon's martyrology and enabled Foxe to give a cohesive, trans-European account of Protestant martyrs in his Acts and monuments.