"We are really in an Enemies Country": Afterlives of Spenser’s Language in Early Ascendancy Ireland

• In Event: Making Early Modern Studies Irish: Engaging with the Work of Nicholas Canny II

Abstract

One of the most important insights that emerged from Nicholas Canny’s work on Ireland and the Atlantic World centered on the language of colonialist ideology. As Canny most notably pointed out, Edmund Spenser was central in providing the words that buttressed his representations of the Irish and the Old English and, by the same token, the English; yet while Spenser’s dream of total conquest was achieved in the seventeenth century, the language he forged would continue to have an extensive afterlife. This paper will build on Canny’s work by exploring the linguistic echo chamber that caused Spenserian language to reappear at the end of the seventeenth century, among Ascendancy Protestants who bewailed the “still-barbarous land.” On a larger level, it will investigate the manner in which an ideological vocabulary, however shared, is nevertheless dependent upon its immediate context and circumstance, which transform that language in turn.

Author

• Sarah Covington, CUNY, Queens College