Medieval Invasions in Modern Irish Literature by Julieann Veronica Ulin (review)

“Afaithless wife,” Mr. Deasy insists in “Nestor,” “first brought the strangers to our shore”—Dervorgilla (U 2.392-93).

Years ago when I took students to Ireland for the first time, driving the narrow, crooked roads down to W. B. Yeats’s Innisfree, we happened on the ruins of a castle and dallied there for an hour of a rainy afternoon. My heart leapt. We were in the realm of Tiernan O’Rourke, Lord of Breffni. Dervorgilla, his wife, eloped with or was kidnapped by Leinster’s Diarmuid MacMurrough. O’Rourke got her back, but not long later, MacMurrough used the Normans to get his revenge. My students had read not only “Nestor” but also Yeats’s and Lady Augusta Gregory’s plays on Dervorgilla.¹ How fortunate if the tour guide would say, “Here began all Ireland’s misfortunes.” No such luck. Sixteenth-century British colonists, the unromantic Parke family, built the manor house. They took the stones from an older Irish keep, but Dervorgilla never lived there. The real ruin of O’Rourke’s castle was hidden in the wilderness, inaccessible to tourists, and not worth the effort of finding it.

A hundred years ago, a travel writer, Burton E. Stevenson, had nearly the same experience, only this time, as Julieann Veronica Ulin tells the story in her second chapter, “Medieval Cycles,” the locals told him it was O’Rourke’s castle. Stevenson discovered it was not, but he could not resist putting a picture of it in his The Charm of Ireland anyway.² Ulin made the trip herself and found Thomas Moore’s ballad, “The Song of O’Ruark,” playing over a sound system, “a kind of poetic sleight of hand” suggesting to tourists that there was some connection to Dervorgilla (67).³ This persistent impulse to mythologize the site is indulged as often as it is resisted, an emblem of Ulin’s postmedieval approach to history.

Postmedievalists, Ulin tells us, “bring the medieval and modern into productive critical relation” (14).⁴ Parke’s Castle and other remains of medieval entities are so remote from their real, contextual events that they float free, allowing us today to use them as we wish to interpret our own world. It is an ahistorical view of the medieval, though Eileen Joy and Craig Dionne, the editors of the journal postmedieval, claim that their method is “not ‘against’ history, of course, but against ‘historicism in its more unreflective and problematic forms.’”⁵ I think it is safe to say that postmedievalists suspect most historians today of unreflectivity and are convinced that their discipline is founded on the naive belief that careful investigators can recover what really happened. Postmedievalists know that events are always implicated in the nets of culture surrounding them, so no account can ever be said to be “accurate.” Postmedievalism deconstructs, demythologizes, and wants to cut the medieval artifact free from the ropes that moor it to supposedly real, verifiable, underlying events.

Ulin’s book tells how this story concerning Dervorgilla, O’Rourke, and MacMurrough, which occurred between 1152 and 1172, has been preserved, like Parke’s Castle, as a textual ruin of the medieval world. Nineteenth-century Irish nationalists began their tale of Irish history in the midst of that ruin. Like Eve and Helen before her, Dervorgilla triggered Ireland’s fall from an edenic, pre-invasion, self-determining nation, casting the Irish into eight hundred years of servitude to the “stranger in the house.” This domestic trope—the interloper in one’s home—determined who was considered Irish and who was not (4). Giraldus Cambrensis’s The History of the Conquest of Ireland, initiated the trope, according to Ulin (10-11).⁶ His Dervorgilla is so compelling that she becomes a monolith, a “received causal narrative of Irish history” that squeezes out any sense of Irish identity other than those consistent with the stranger-in-the-house mentality of, say, (this is my example) Douglas Hyde’s “On the...