Ireland and the Renaissance court is an interdisciplinary collection of essays exploring Irish and English courts, courtiers and politics in the early modern period, c. 1450-1650. Chapters are contributed by both established and emergent scholars working in the fields of history, literary studies, and philology. They focus on Gaelic cúirteanna, the indigenous centres of aristocratic life throughout the medieval period; on the regnal court of the emergent British empire based in London at Whitehall; and on Irish participation in the wider world of European elite life and letters. Collectively, they expand the chronological limits of ‘early modern’ Ireland to include the fifteenth century and recreate its multi-lingual character through exploration of its English, Irish and Latin archives. This volume is an innovative effort at moving beyond binary approaches to English-Irish history by demonstrating points of contact as well as contention.

"Following the ground-breaking volume Ireland in the Renaissance, c.1540–1660 (2007) by the same editors, this multidisciplinary collection in history, art history, literature and archaeology examines the region of the English Pale in Ireland -- and the concept of the Pale itself -- during the early modern period. Subjects covered include hidden houses at Athy, Co. Kildare, and Carstown, Co. Louth; the Gaelic Irish of east Leinster and their countrymen at the London court; music; theatre; powerful Geraldine women; the classical and political pretensions of the ‘Old English’ community; church settlement; literary martyrdom; book ownership; the Irish language; a new interpretation of the earl of Strafford’s daunting pile at Jigginstown near Naas, Co. Kildare, and more."--Publisher's description.

This book brings to life the cross-currents of European 'Renaissance' culture in Ireland, primarily outside the Pale. Essays focus on institutions such as Peter White's grammar school in Kilkenny; monuments, including the funeral art of Kilkenny and Lord Deputy Sir Henry Sidney's decorated stone bridge at Athlone; buildings such as the fortified houses of Laois-Offaly, the decorated Butler mansion at Carrick-on-Suir, and Sir Walter Raleigh's house in Youghal; maps, including the sinister colonial cartography of Richard Bartlett; texts such as Counter-Reformation polemic and nationalist historiography, women's writing from the 1641 rebellion, and the published Dublin celebrations of King Charles II's Restoration.

Britain has historically been seen as an upholder of international norms, at least in its relations with western powers. This has often been contrasted with the violence perpetrated in colonial contexts on other continents. What is often missed, however, is the extent to which the state with its capital in London—first England, then Great Britain—inflicted extreme violence on its European neighbours, even when still using the rhetoric of neighbourliness and friendship. This book comprises eleven case-studies of Anglo-British strategic violence, from the siege of Harfleur in 1415 to the fire-bombing of Hamburg in 1943. Chapters examine actions that were top-down and directed, and perpetrated for specific geopolitical reasons—many of them at, or well beyond, the bounds of what was sanctioned by prevailing international norms at the time. The contributors look at how these actions were conceived, executed and perceived by the English/British public, by the international legal community of the time, and by the victims. This history of English violence in Europe complicates not only easy notions of England/Britain as a champion of the ‘standards of civilisation’ or of the ‘liberal international order’, but also of the supposed distinction between ‘European’ and ‘extra-European’ warfare.

Early Modern Ireland: New Sources, Methods, and Perspectives offers fresh approaches and case studies that push the field of early modern Ireland, and of British and European history more generally, into unexplored directions. The centuries between 1500 and 1700 were pivotal in Ireland’s history, yet so much about this period has remained neglected until relatively recently, and a great deal has yet to be explored. Containing seventeen original and individually commissioned essays by an international and interdisciplinary group of leading and emerging scholars, this book covers a wide range of topics, including social, cultural, and political history as well as folklore, medicine, archaeology, and digital humanities, all of which are enhanced by a selection of maps, graphs, tables, and images. Urging a reevaluation of the terms and assumptions which have been used to describe Ireland’s past, and a consideration of the new directions in which the study of early modern Ireland could be taken, Early Modern Ireland: New Sources, Methods, and Perspectives is a groundbreaking collection for students and scholars studying early modern Irish history.

The Elizabethan conquest of Ireland sparked off two linguistic events of enduring importance: it initiated the language shift from Irish to English, which constitutes the great drama of Irish cultural history, and it marked the beginnings of English linguistic expansion. The Elizabethan colonisers in Ireland included some of the leading poets and translators of the day. In Language and Conquest in Early Modern Ireland, Patricia Palmer uses their writings, as well as material from the State Papers, to explore the part that language played in shaping colonial ideology and English national identity. Palmer shows how manoeuvres of linguistic expansion rehearsed in Ireland shaped Englishmen's encounters with the languages of the New World, and frames that analysis within a comparison between English linguistic colonisation and Spanish practice in the New World. This is an ambitious, comparative study, which will interest literary and political historians.

The Oxford History of Poetry in English (OHOPE) is designed to offer a fresh, multi-voiced, and comprehensive analysis of 'poetry': from Anglo-Saxon culture through contemporary British, Irish, American, and Global culture, including English, Scottish, and Welsh poetry, Anglo-American colonial and post-colonial poetry, and poetry in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the Caribbean, India, Africa, Asia, and other international locales. OHOPE both synthesizes existing scholarship and presents cutting-edge research, employing a global team of expert contributors for each of the fourteen volumes. By taking as its purview the full seventeenth century, 1603-1700, this volume re-draws the existing literary historical map and expands upon recent rethinking of the canon. Placing the revolutionary years at the centre of a century of poetic transformation, and putting the Restoration back into the seventeenth century, the volume registers the transformative effects on poetic forms of a century of social, political, and religious upheaval. It considers the achievements of a number of women poets, not yet fully integrated into traditional literary histories. It assimilates the vibrant literature of the English Revolution to what came before and after, registering its long-term impact. It traces the development of print culture and of the literary marketplace, alongside the continued circulation of poetry in manuscript. It places John Milton, Andrew Marvell, Margaret Cavendish, and Katherine Philips and other mid-century poets into the full century of specifically literary development. It traces continuity and change, imitation and innovation in the full-century trajectory of such poetic genres as sonnet, elegy, satire, georgic, epigram, ode, devotional lyric, and epic. The volume's attention to poetic form builds on the current upswing in historicist formalism, allowing a close focus on poetry as an intensely aesthetic and social literary mode. Designed for maximum classroom utility, the organization is both thematic and (in the authors section) chronological. After a comprehensive Introduction, organizational sections focus on Transitions; Materiality, Production, and Circulation; Poetics and Form; Genres; and Poets.