Ireland and Books

To think of Ireland is to think of books. A connection between place and representation has been tensely fraught for centuries, with competition between languages, cultures, and politics registered throughout Irish writing. An early case in point is Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene, its author present in the pages of The Oxford History of the Irish Book, Volume III: The Irish Book in English, 1550–1800 as a new English colonist serving as secretary to Lord Grey in Dublin. The poet and his patron are two points in a cartography that shifts with every change in the island's conditions, from the defeat of the Gaelic aristocracy at the Battle of Kinsale in 1601 to the rising of 1798. The United Irishmen were encouraged in their republicanism by Thomas Paine's The Rights of Man, a pamphlet that ran to seven editions in the early 1790s, as David Dickson discovered, selling ten thousand copies of the first three issues alone. These moments of clarity shine from the dark of a material dearth of evidence in this study's early period. Ireland was, in 1550, a place where English was the minority language. With the growth of print and the new English state from Dublin outwards, Irish was the language under pressure by 1800.

As editors of this excellent history, Raymond Gillespie and Andrew Hadfield have set themselves to a cooperative project whose acknowledgements give some sense of the achievement of their contributors, and the scope of their scholarship, which has taken them to the libraries of Ireland, Britain, Europe, and the Americas trawling for information either long lost or forgotten. In this, the heroic work of earlier bibliogaphers like E. R. McClintock Dix and, more recently, Vincent Kinnane, merges with the best in contemporary book scholarship, such as Tony Barnard's essay on print culture, a model of scholarly critique, which wonders about how readers' imaginations leapt on reading books on the captivity of the Jews, the exploits of the Milesians, or the Battle of Aughrim. The colonial condition of Ireland was experienced, in this sense, as metaphor, the stories of others always understood as stories of selves, the stories of selves always figured as stories of others. This is one of many points in the book where an insight into this early period applies to later Ireland, to the culture of Vladimir and Estragon's desolate, fragmentary dialogues in Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, a culture that pulls between memory and forgetting.

This volume roots its wavering discourse in four analytical sections, "Print Culture," "The Structure of Print," "Collecting and Reading Print," and "The Impact of Print," the last, largest, and most wide ranging of the book's components, surveying literature, science, history, theater, foreign-language books, and politics. There are twelve illustrations and no weakness apparent in the twenty-two essays collected, each contributor bringing his subject to fascinating life. Read, for example, from Gillespie and Hadfield's introduction, situating print in a vibrant, chaotic world of ideas such as shook the post-Reformation Atlantic world, the editors understanding the book as a motive object of multiple significance. One image that stays with me, given the oral traditions of Irish language before the seventeenth century, comes from the rebellion of 1641, when Catholic Ireland rose up to attack its possessors. The association of Protestant hegemony with the printed word emerged in physical attacks on the Bible, such as that of one rebel who reported to have "pissed on the same saying I could do worse with it if I could." The printed word had a varied life in the seventeenth century, not always revolutionary. John Dunton visited the library of Trinity College Dublin in 1698 and found its books displayed with a male skeleton, medals, and other curiosities.

As this multiplicity suggests, the question of printing leads, necessarily, to the question of reading, or what the editors call the spectrum of literacies...