Women, Writing, and Language in Early Modern Ireland (review)

Marie-Louise Coolahan’s Women, Writing, and Language in Early Modern Ireland is a meticulously researched and compellingly written corrective to the long-standing bias towards male authors in Irish literary studies. Even as recent studies move beyond the “dominant literary giants” of Edmund Spenser and Jonathan Swift, their analyses of such neglected concerns as “military, historiographical, dramatic, and romance texts” are still confined to writings by men (p. 6). By turning to a diverse array of texts written by native-born Irish women, Irish women in exile, and English and Anglo-Welsh women who resided in Ireland, Coolahan can trace more fully the numerous instances of “cross-fertilization” that helped render the years between 1574 and 1676 a “period of political, religious, and linguistic contestation that encompassed the key power struggles of early modern Ireland” (p. 1).

Chapters are organized around genre, an approach which, as promised, quite effectively “complements the diversity of cultures, languages and identities at play and challenges the perception of a dearth of writing produced by women in Ireland in this period” (p. 8). However, each chapter also contains more examples than can be recounted here of the riches unearthed by Coolahan’s archaeological digs into “the layers of authority and mediation” embedded in the works of numerous individual women writers (p. 5). These women are compelling in their own right as well as for the multifarious ways in which they helped to write and were written by “Ireland.”

The first chapter details how the English crown’s destabilization in the 1600s of “Gaelic structures of government” and the hereditary castes of fileadha (male poets) that served them opened a space for the scribal preservation of “more vernacular kinds of verse” including women’s “keens” (p. 16). A body of caoineadh (keens) by Caitlin Dubh unknowingly registers the tensions in this dynamic by both taking on the traditionally bardic themes of “genealogy, military valour, patronage, and hospitality” and using them to lament the death of a known accommodationist to Tudor policy, Donnchadh, the fourth earl of Thomond (p. 21). Alternatively, the bean chaointe (keening woman), Fionnghuala Ni Bhriainn, operated more consciously outside the dying world of literary patronage, using the keen of the bean si (banshee) to address her “personal bereavement” for her dead husband, Uaithne, rather than a “chief’s public legacy” (p. 34).

English assaults on Irish institutions, including of course Catholicism, also capacitated women’s production of prose, as chapter two delineates. Like the fileadha, the “hereditary learned classes” trained in the “elaborate literary aesthetics” of elite prose were going the way of the larger systems they supported, and “the political functions of writing in Irish were redirected” towards a “more demotic” readership (p. 69). The Counter-Reformation spurred the exiled Poor Clares to translate foundational works of Catholic devotion into the Irish vernacular, and the Cromwellian Wars incited Mary Browne, the Bethlehem order’s third abbess who was exiled to Madrid in the late 1660s, to write a “nun’s chronicle” in English that indicted the New Model Army’s attack on the convent in 1642 and its dispersal of the nuns in 1653.

Surprisingly large numbers of Irish women utilized and manipulated the protocols of petitions to address the English crown as well as the Spanish state, which Coolahan details in chapter three. Scholars familiar with Elizabeth I’s relationship to such male poets as Spenser and Philip Sidney will be especially interested in Coolahan’s account of the queen’s exchanges with Eleanor Fitzgerald, the wife and widow of a leading Munster rebel, and Grace O’Malley, a Gaelic chief and reputed pirate. Far from embodying Petrarchan male fantasies of the remote Faerie Queen, the Queen Elizabeth who parleyed directly with Fitzgerald and O’Malley apparently enjoyed the bellicosity that these women sometimes used to address their female sovereign.

Chapter four examines the “1641 Depositions” that Protestant Irish women gave to authorities after the Ulster uprising. Acknowledging but deliberately “side-stepping...