The Renaissance and the Celtic Countries (review)

This book reprints volume 18, number 1 (March 2004) of Renaissance Studies, the journal of the Society for Renaissance Studies. The five essays included here were originally presented at a conference (University of Wales, Swansea, 2001) that sought to bridge the terms Celtic and Renaissance. "Celtic elements," Ceri Davies notes in the preface, "have often been viewed as forces which were bent on shackling native cultures to their past and resisting any Renaissance-inspired influences" (vii). That Ireland, Scotland, and Wales were very much participants in a wider European Renaissance is this volume's central thrust. Unfortunately, the two-page preface does little justice to the ways in which this volume participates in creating a less-Anglocentric literary and cultural history of early modern Britain and Ireland.

The subject of John Barry's opening essay is Richard Stanihurst's De Rebus in Hibernia Gestis (Antwerp, 1584), an account of the twelfth-century "Norman" conquest of Ireland. Divided into four books, De Rebus begins with an ethnographical account of the Irish, followed by three books of narrative. The first half of Barry's essay is given over to Stanihurst the scholar, the second to Stanihurst the Palesman. Attending to the scholar, Barry notes that much of De Rebus is indebted to classical ethnography — Sallust, Caesar, Livy, Tacitus — and that Stanihurst's writing is firmly grounded in Ciceronian imitatio: numerous examples are provided. This leads Barry to celebrate "the liveliness and depth of Stanihurst's scholarship"; Stanihurst, Barry adds, "was truly a fitting member of the res publica litterarum" (8). Given the stakes involved in this text (which, of course, could not be printed in England), Barry would have done well to situate Stanihurst's subtle use of classical sources within a wider framework of British political thought. Given that the section on Stanihurst the Palesman foregrounds Stanihurst's politics, in particular his "loyalty to the British crown" (18), a stronger link between the two sections would have been fruitful. Also, had Barry drawn more upon Irish historians — such as Nicholas Canny and Vincent Carey (as well as literary historians: I have in mind the plethora of work on Spenser and Ireland) — this essay's contribution to the rich work on Stanihurst and early modern Ireland's Old English Pale community would have been more profound.

Byron Harries opens his essay on the seventeenth-century Welsh- and Catholic- born poet John Owen by comparing Owen's life to that of another Catholic-born poet who also attended Oxford and who also publicly renounced his Catholic faith: John Donne. Unlike Donne, however, Owen resisted the call to enlist in the Anglican clergy; moreover, the Welsh poet produced a body of poetry that was published, between 1606 and 1613, in Latin. According to Harries, Owen chose to write and publish verse solely in Latin so to project an "image of a new, national British state throughout Europe" (26), and many examples from Owen's epigrams are discussed to bear witness to the poet's celebration of the "tergeminum imperium" (29). If the posthumous publication of Donne's poems served to establish Donne's national reputation, Owen's posthumous reputation went from a national one to one extended throughout Europe, thanks in no small part to Dutch printing presses. This is a fine essay, especially in its attention to the ways in which Owen's deep-rooted Welshness and Catholicism inform his negotiation of a British identity in his Latin verse. While Harries is aware of how Owen's concept of British Union as a tergeminum imperium resonates with King James VI/I's British project, the link could have been even stronger, particularly had Harries drawn upon W. B. Patterson's King James VI and I and the Reunion of Christendom (1998), which explores James's attempts and desires to mend divisions among Christian European states.

The focus on Wales continues in the next essay, which traces the...