Representations of Women in Some Early Modern English Tracts on the Colonization of Ireland

Abstract

Since D. B. Quinn's The Elizabethans and the Irish, the history of early modern Ireland has been the subject of a wide range of studies, but only recently has women's role in that history received attention. Similarly, Nicholas Canny's article on “Edmund Spenser and the Development of an Anglo-Irish Identity” initiated a debate about whether sixteenth-century tracts on Ireland express a unified colonialist ideology, but only recently has the construction of sexuality in these texts come under scrutiny. It is not surprising that those who study the history of women in early modern Ireland do not often turn to the English tracts for evidence, except with great caution and reservation. So much related in these documents is indebted to the stereotypes of a colonialist discourse, initiated by Giraldus Cambrensis in the twelfth century, rather than to observation or encounter. Recent work on the history of women in early modern Ireland presents us with a sense of what is not being represented in the English settlers' descriptions. Such aspects of women's lives in Gaelic Ireland as their right to hold and acquire their own land and to keep their own names while married are not referred to in these tracts. These tracts do not yield transparent information about actual Irish women of the period, although there are fascinating references to their activities. Spenser writes that Irish women had “the trust and care of all things both at home and in the fields.” And at least one woman, the foster mother of Murrogh O'Brien, is said to have drunk the blood of her child's head as she grieved when he had been drawn and quartered by the English. The character of these texts as colonialist discourse makes the representation of women as a symbolic category or “gender” the more useful focus rather than some unmediated sense of “women.”

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