A Landscape of Words: Ireland, Britain and the Poetics of Space, 700–1250 by Amy C. Mulligan (review)

The importance of place—spatial, geographical, topographical—in Irish literature has long been recognized, but as Amy Mulligan notes in this insightful and compelling study, perhaps too much so as a feature rather than a character. Engaging with Gaston Bachelard’s poetics of space and heeding his urging that “we must listen to poets” (The Poetics of Space, cited in Mulligan, p. 12), Mulligan produces a sustained reflection on spatial elements in medieval Irish literature spanning six hundred years. This project begins with an introduction defining an Irish poetics of space as “encompass[ing] a great many modes, devices, characteristics and styles . . . unified in the production of landscapes of words, places that become powerfully accessible and inviting, enduring through their verbalization and textual inscription” (p. 14). This definition provides the framework for Mulligan’s overarching argument that in their development of this Irish poetics of space, medieval Irish writers were participating in a national cultural project. Mulligan argues that these writers “did not only innovate significantly in developing a geospatial literature . . . medieval Irish thinkers also enacted a medieval ‘spatial turn’, a focused and sustained literary consideration of what it means to be in a powerfully transformative landscape” (p. 5). The geospatial narratives and discursive Irish landscapes these authors produced throughout the medieval period comprised “powerful, portable worlds that could be accessed and occupied by readers and listeners anywhere and at any time” (p. 20). The compulsively readable five chapters following this introduction engage an extensive corpus of diverse Irish medieval texts in exploration and analysis of their illustration of this Irish poetics of space.

Chapter 1 traces the initial development of an Irish poetics of space in early writings. Mulligan first considers the seventh-century De locis sanctis (“Concerning sacred places”; hereafter DLS) of Adomnán, abbot of Iona, which presents a narrative featuring Arculf, a Gaulish bishop traveling to the Holy Land, incorporating geography and Biblical exegesis to offer the earliest extant British account of a voyage to Jerusalem. Through Arculf, Mulligan argues, “DLS transmits an embodied, sense-based engagement with the Holy Land” (p. 26), verbally mapping that geography in words for readers of this text to visit and revisit, using the narrative design in contemplation to imaginatively accompany Arculf through his pilgrimage. The poetics of space engaged in the composition of this text bring Ireland into association with the Holy Land, from the perimeter of the medieval world to its center. Mulligan’s discussion moves from De locis sanctis to Adomnán’s slightly later Vita Sancti Columbae (“Life of Saint Columba,” ca. 697–704) as a further development of the Hiberno-Latin spatial poetics demonstrated in DLS, moving west rather than towards the Holy Land. Where actual voyages through the north Atlantic archipelagoes are fraught with danger, these textual voyages offer “verbalized engagement with these remote and dangerous places so that both monastic communities and other audiences might have access to the transformations catalyzed by imaginative spatial movement through the marvelous seascapes of the North Atlantic” (p. 37). Mulligan next considers the ca. eighth/ninth-century Navigatio Sancti Brendani Abbatis (“The Voyage of Saint Brendan”), evaluating how this popular tale also engages with the use of an Irish poetics of space to engage the reader. She concludes the chapter with a discussion of the Immram Curaig Maíle Dúin (“The Voyage of Maíle Dúin”), a slightly later prose vernacular voyage text, to show how the development of the Irish poetics of space begun with De locis sanctis expands beyond earlier religious writings into other, lay literary forms.

Chapter 2 focuses on the Táin Bó Cúalnge (“The Cattle-Raid of Cooley”) and other Ulster Cycle stories featuring the legendary Irish hero Cú Chulainn and the centrality of Ireland’s landscape to these tales. “Virtually every aspect of Cú Chulainn’s biography...