Guaranteeing What Cannot Be Guaranteed: Patronly Relations Adapted and Transformed in Late Tudor Ireland

• In Event: Irish Bardic Poetry and the Transition from Medieval to Early Modern

Abstract

The Elizabethan conquest of Ireland radically transformed Irish society, displacing traditional elites, imposing new legal, political and economic structures, reshaping social and cultural norms and relations, and bringing increasing state violence and corresponding insurgency. While some critics have described Ireland’s hereditary, professional poets as mired in a static, archaic practice that rendered them oblivious or indifferent to these changes, others have discerned innovation: sociocultural critique, the deployment of charged keywords, reorientations of political ideology, and a religious and ethnocultural recalibration of identity. This paper contributes to this debate by detailing how a c.1585 praise poem by master-poet Tadhg Dall Ó hUiginn to Cormac Ó hEadhra, heretofore read in narrowly historical/evidentiary terms, dynamically transforms the terms of legal imposition into the poetic occasion and metaphorical means for adapting and reinscribing traditional patronly poetic relations and practice, demonstrating wit, innovation, resilience and canny self-preservation in the face of radical sociocultural assault.

Author

• Sarah E. McKibben, University of Notre Dame