Coolahan Writing Before 1700 AM Version for OA

Home , Baron Inchiquin, Contention of the Bards, Irish bardic poetry

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Title Writing before 1700

Author(s) Coolahan, Marie-Louise

Publication Date 2018-08

Coolahan, Marie-Louise. (2018). Writing before 1700. In Publication Heather Ingman & Clíona Ó Gallchóir (Eds.), A History of Information Modern Irish Women's Literature. Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press.

Publisher Cambridge University Press

Link to publisher's https://dx.doi.org/10.1017/9781316442999 version

Item record http://hdl.handle.net/10379/15973

DOI http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/9781316442999

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Coolahan, ‘Writing before 1700’, A History of Modern Irish Women’s Literature (CUP, 2018), 18-36

This essay was published in Heather Ingman and Clíona Ó Gallchóir (eds), A History of Modern Irish Women’s Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), pp. 18-36. DOI: 10.1017/9781316442999 This is the Accepted Manuscript (AM); the Version of Record (VoR) is available in the published book.

Chapter 1 Writing before 1700 Marie-Louise Coolahan

The broad spectrum of literary composition and writerly activity by women in Ireland before 1700 is characterized by diversity in terms of language, form and function. The oral culture of Gaelic tradition centred on vernacular verse and song; exposure to state bureaucracies cultivated literacy; experiences of displacement generated various forms of autobiographical narratives; efforts to re-establish convents led to the production of Catholic religious documents; the arrival of settlers proficient in English manuscript culture introduced new poetic and devotional genres; increased literacy and mobility demanded epistolary skills. What women’s writing of this period lacks in terms of quantity it gains in variety. It is the product of different and sometimes overlapping communities inhabiting the island: the native, or Gaelic Irish; the Old English, descended from the Normans; and the New English, the colonial settler class that arrived from the sixteenth century. It emerged from distinct inherited and new linguistic and literary traditions. Moreover, scholarly understanding and recovery of female-authored texts has proliferated over the past twenty years, opening up a rich field that invites further research. Little prior to the early modern period is known to survive. ‘Digde’s Lament’, more commonly known as ‘The Lament of the Old Woman of Beare’, composed c.900, is the only extant example of female-authored verse from the Old Irish period. As Máirín Ní Dhonnchadha, whose research in this field has provided a definitive map of the terrain, has shown, there is evidence of other early medieval poets by reputation: Laitheog Laídeach; Líadan, wife of Cuirither; Úallach, daughter of Muimnechán; the unnamed daughter of úa Dulsaine; and Gormlaith.1 The Classical Irish period (c.1200-1600) developed and entrenched a sophisticated literary infrastructure across Ireland and Scotland that mitigated against the scribal preservation of verse by non-elite poets. This was dominated by the male hereditary caste of professional poets, known as fileadha, of whom the most exalted was the ollamh. These men trained for years in bardic schools, becoming adept in the forms and rules of literary composition – history and genealogy as well as poetry – which were precise and demanding in their codification of metres and rhyme schemes. They were, perhaps understandably, inhospitable to lower-class, untrained versifiers who composed amhráin (popular songs). But their expressions of distaste and contempt for such authors have left us some tantalising glimpses of female authorship. Giolla na Naomh Ó hUiginn, for example, dismissed collectively ‘abhrán ban agus bhachlach’ (‘the song of women and churls’) in the fourteenth century.2 Feidhlim Mac Dhubhghaill, a sixteenth-century Scottish fileadh, suggested that, for him, women were the lowest of the low, spitting: ‘fuath liom cliar ara mbí bean’ (‘I hate a poet-band that includes a woman’).3 Further accounts of women’s composition of verse emerged as English settlers began to inhabit the island in the sixteenth century. Women figured as ‘mannigscoule’ (a phonetic rendering of mná siubhail, walking

Coolahan, ‘Writing before 1700’, A History of Modern Irish Women’s Literature (CUP, 2018), 18-36 women) in a 1561 account by Thomas Smyth, a Dubin-based English apothecary: ‘ther order is for to singe and the chyfest of them most haue but one eye’.4 A list of poets compiled in Cork in 1584 identified among them one ‘Mary-ny-Donoghue, a she-barde; and Mary-ny- Clancy, rymer’.5 What survives of such women’s verse composition derives from a literary culture that was predominantly oral. Even the elite poetry of the fileadha, with its intricate and interlocking structures of rhyme, alliteration, assonance and syllabic metre, was designed for oral performance.6 We know of only one Irish woman, Brighid Fitzgerald (c.1589-1682) inghean iarla Chille Dara (daughter of the twelfth earl of Kildare), who composed poetry in the elite style. This poem is in óglachas, or amateur syllabic verse – bardic poetry, that is, composed by someone outside the hereditary caste of Gaelic poets. Composed between 1603 and 1607, ‘A mhacaoimh dhealbhas an dán’ (‘O young man who composes the poem’) is a riposte to a witty love poem addressed to Brighid, from her husband’s ally, Cú Chonnacht Óg Mág Uidhir. This instigator poem was in fact commissioned; its real author was the professional poet Eochaidh Ó hEodhasa. Brighid’s answer poem dismantles her interlocutor’s arguments through literary critique. She unmasks the author as a professional who betrays himself through his impeccable skill, unable to impersonate an amateur (such as Mág Uidhir or even herself). Her repudiation hinges on Fitzgerald’s own competency in óglachas and as an interpreter of bardic verse, and there has been some discussion as to the authenticity of her authorship.7 But she was not without contemporaries in Scotland, which shared the same literary culture until the Reformation and Stuart dynasty caused the fracturing of Gaelic culture. Four amateur syllabic poems by Aithbhreac inghean Coirceadail and Iseabail Ní Mheic Cailéin augment our picture of women’s participation in elite bardic culture.8 Beyond amateur composition, that participation included patronage, as is evident from the many bardic poems in praise of female patrons.9 That such traditions of benefaction persisted in the face of apparently opposing political and cultural allegiances is clear from the practices of Donough O’Brien, fourth earl of Thomond, of Gaelic descent although raised a Protestant, and Richard Boyle, first earl of Cork who arrived as a penniless New English settler, both of whom retained bardic poets notwithstanding their military and political support of the English crown. That women of Boyle’s class were equally immersed and adaptable is evident from the case of Martha Stafford, who married Sir Henry O’Neill of Clandeboye, and whose English nobility as well as active patronage of the fileadha is celebrated in the O’Neill’s family poem-book.10 As the seventeenth century progressed and English power became entrenched, Gaelic literary infrastructures such as the bardic schools became unsustainable. The silver lining, for those interested in non-elite verse, is that understanding of the threat to Gaelic culture provoked a greater concern to preserve more vernacular forms. Moves to preserve non-bardic alongside professional verse in manuscript duanairí (anthologies or family poem-books) escalated among scribes at the turn of the eighteenth century. Hence, the manuscript preservation of verse by women occurred as the formal structures of elite culture were dissipating – orally transmitted forms such as the caoineadh (keen or lament), which were dominated by women, were concertedly recorded. A caoineadh was traditionally composed and sung by women in order to lament the dead. Its metrical form is based on accentual sounds that reflected the rhythms of speech rather than syllabic schemes. For this particular form, the rhyme scheme is maintained by the final stressed vowel of each line. Six caointe from the seventeenth century are known to survive, all preserved in manuscript poem-books (duanairí) associated with branches of the O’Brien dynasty of Thomond, county Clare. Five keens attributed to a woman named Caitilín Dubh are copied into Duanaire Uí Bhriain, the poem-book commissioned by Sir Donough O’Brien (1642- 1717) in 1712. Compiled alongside such celebrated professional verse as the series,

Coolahan, ‘Writing before 1700’, A History of Modern Irish Women’s Literature (CUP, 2018), 18-36

Iomarbhágh na bhFileadh (‘The Contention of the Bards’), Caitilín Dubh’s poems elegize one generation of O’Briens: Donnchadh (Donough), fourth earl of Thomond; his sister Máire and her husband Toirdhealbhach Ruadh Mac Mathghamhna (Turlough Roe MacMahon); and Diarmaid (Dermot), Baron Inchiquin – all of whom died in the 1620s.11 In these poems, Caitilín Dubh exploits the personae available to her as a woman, incorporating the supernatural figure of the bean sí (fairy woman, often phonetically anglicized as banshee) to make literary space for her own voice. Aoibheall, the territorial figure associated with Thomond and the O’Briens’ claims to its domain, for example, is encountered bereft in the keen on Diarmaid; this imaginative encounter provokes and licenses the female speaker’s lament. These poems are remarkable for their fusion of bardic thematic tropes (genealogy, literary patronage, military heroism) with the prosody and materials of lament. This is most pronounced in her poem on the death of Donough, fourth earl – who was a complicated subject for Gaelic poetry, given his simultaneous military support of crown forces (not least during the notorious siege of Kinsale in 1601) and cultural support of Gaelic poets. Caitilín Dubh squares this circle by framing her subject’s military exploits according to traditional bardic paradigms. For example, his command of forces against the Gaelic Irish during the Nine Years War is cast in the traditional terms of a caithréim, or battle-roll. Startling at first glance, the female poet’s pragmatic accommodation of her addressee’s allegiances and military actions was, in fact, a strategy assayed by a number of her contemporaries, seeking to adapt to new realities. Fionnghuala Ní Bhriain’s caoineadh, also preserved in a family poem-book, articulates a more personal loss: that of her husband, Uaithne Mór Ó Lochlainn (whose descendant Brian Ó Lochlainn had this duanaire compiled in 1727). If Caitilín Dubh’s poems are gendered in their evocation and manipulation of female voices, Ní Bhriain’s is most overly gendered in its assertion of the widow’s vulnerability. Both petition and lament, this poem sets its mourning of her second husband in tandem with the death of her former protector, the third earl of Thomond, to present an inconsolable isolated speaker.12 What survives offers only the outlines of the verse that was authored by Gaelic women. Yet the wide evidence of female patronage, and the single surviving syllabic poem by Brighid Fitzgerald – whose attribution was, at the least, deemed credible at the time – points to women’s active participation in contemporary literary culture at elite levels of the court as well as with more popular forms of vernacular composition. Sophisticated engagement with that literary culture, and high levels of literacy, can be seen in the compilation of manuscripts for specific female patrons. A fifteenth-century manuscript version of the prose tale, Cath Finntrágha (‘The Battle of Ventry’) was made for Sadhbh Ní Mháille; devotional works were transcribed in 1513 for Máire Ní Mháille (d. 1522) and a life of St Colum Cille in 1608 for another Ulster woman, Róis Óg Ní Dhomnaill (cousin to Rudhraighe Ó Domhnaill, Brighid Fitzgerald’s husband).13 Perhaps most celebrated is the manuscript known as Leabhar Inghine Í Dhomhnaill (‘The Book of O’Donnell’s Daughter’) associated with the Irish regiment in Flanders, and compiled in exile between 1622 and 1650. The O’Donnell woman concerned, Nualaidh Ní Dhomhnaill, was sister-in-law to Brighid Fitzgerald. She left for Europe with her brother and nephew in September 1607 as part of the expedition known as the ‘flight of the earls’. Nualaidh took charge of her nephew’s education at the Franciscan Irish college in Louvain from 1609. Her importance as a figurehead for Gaelic exiles is reflected in five poems concerning her that are transcribed in the poem-book compiled in her name.14 The spread of literacy among women and the courting of bilingual audiences, both Old English and native Irish, are further attested in the efforts made by the Poor Clare nuns to have their religious order’s foundational documents translated from English into Irish. Five Irish women were professed as members of the order of St. Clare at the exiled English convent at Gravelines in the Low Countries, in the 1620s. The order’s rule, prescribing the

Coolahan, ‘Writing before 1700’, A History of Modern Irish Women’s Literature (CUP, 2018), 18-36 procedures of convent life, had been translated into English and printed in 1621. When they returned to establish a foundation in Ireland, first in Dublin whence they were removed to an island on Lough Ree, near Athlone, the Irish nuns arranged for that rule, and the revisions printed in English as the Declarations and Ordinances in 1622, to be translated into Irish. The surviving manuscript was copied in 1636 by no less a figure than Mícheál Ó Cléirigh, the Franciscan who had left Louvain ten years earlier, on a mission to gather historical materials in Ireland (a project that resulted in the monumental Annals of the Four Masters).15 The nuns’ enlisting of this eminent scholar demonstrates the expansion of female literacy as well as the increasing demand for written texts and the courting of vocations from the widest range of communities. Female religious orders across Europe required documentation: profession records, obituaries, chronicles, and devotional materials. Mother Mary Bonaventure Browne, abbess of the Galway Poor Clare convent from 1647 to 1650 went into exile at the surrender of the city to Cromwellian forces in 1653. Finding sanctuary in the Conceptionist convent, Cavallero de Gracia, in Madrid, she set to writing. According to an eighteenth-century bibliography of Franciscan texts, she composed in Irish at least eleven distinct works, including biography and hagiography as well as devotional works.16 Her chronicle of the order’s foundation and exile is the only one to survive, in an English translation made in the late seventeenth century.17 Such developments also lead us beyond traditionally ‘literary’ genres such as poetry into the many other forms of writing with which women in Ireland engaged. The 1641 Depositions are a case in point: an enormous body of material comprised of narratives about their own experiences, composed by women and men of the settler class in the immediate aftermath of fleeing their homes following the Catholic insurrection of October that year. Held in 31 manuscript volumes at Trinity College Dublin, and recently digitized, the depositions are textual artefacts that capture the encounter of speech with legal process, the moment in which oral narratives were shaped into writing. A royal commission ordered that Protestant victims be examined about their experiences of the insurrection, itemizing losses and identifying culprits. Individuals’ depositions were made orally, written down by scribes (usually in the third person), read back to deponents who could then correct any details, and finally sworn and witnessed. As writing, these texts preserve the traces of their oral composition; phrases and clauses are crossed out or inserted, details fine-tuned. The process by which deponents signed their depositions in itself reveals a wide range of literacy. Once thought the prime measure of literacy, signature ability is now seen as only one of many indicators of reading and writing competency. Signatories to depositions range from those of the upper and middling sort who could sign their names, to tradespeople who would sign initials, to those who attempted a unique sign on the page.18 Deponents could see, hear, or read – if not write – their depositions. They could insert the writings of others, as Thomas Pickering, curate of Killeigh and Lynally in King’s County, did for the siege-letters of Lettice Digby, Baroness Offaly. Offaly had herself circulated the first summons letter she received, along with defiant reply, to the lords justices in Dublin and to James Butler, earl of Ormond and commander of royalist forces in Ireland; they also found their way to London where they were printed.19 Pickering ensured that the full set of summonses and Lady Offaly’s replies were preserved for the historical record by having them scribally copied into his substantial deposition.20 The act of deposing encouraged self-representation and the terms of the commission supplied a narrative structure. Many depositions answered straightforwardly the questions asked but a large number of deponents composed fuller and compelling accounts. The depositions of Elizabeth Price of Armagh or Mary Hammond of Galway, for example, are substantial and sophisticated accounts that build suspense as well as retribution into their stories.21 What is more, in the case of Lady Elizabeth Dowdall, the act of deposing prompted

Coolahan, ‘Writing before 1700’, A History of Modern Irish Women’s Literature (CUP, 2018), 18-36 the composition of a separate first-person account of her military leadership in Limerick – a narrative that is unshackled from the pro-forma constraints of a deposition.22 Moreover, as Dowdall’s example clearly illustrates, their status as legal documents, sworn on the Bible and witnessed, makes it unlikely that anyone but an officer of the commission would be entrusted with the writing. Always problematic as historical sources, due to their reliance on hearsay, rumour and subjective interpretation, their very subjectivity and firsthand perspectives make them valuable as examples of women’s (and men’s) writing.23 If the fallout of the 1641 rising compelled New English Protestants of all classes to head for one of the island’s ports and frame their experiences in writing, warfare and displacement also drove native Irish and Old English Catholics into exile and they, too, had to devise narratives of themselves in order to obtain relief, support, and positions. The territories of Catholic Spain were a draw, not only due to politico-religious affinities but, more pragmatically, because Irish refugees could apply for a Spanish pension (entretenimiento) on the basis of losses and military or financial services to the Counter- Reformation cause. As with the 1641 depositions, these texts needed to follow a pre-ordained formula. The successful petitioner to the Spanish king had to establish Gaelic lineage and specify the nature of service and losses incurred. For women, the bases on which they petitioned were gendered. Unable to act as soldiers, their husbands, fathers, and sons were often the linchpin of their petitions. But their gender could be beneficial in terms of persuasive rhetoric: widowhood conferred a moral obligation that was biblically sanctioned; the picture of a destitute wife and mother drew on long-established tropes of vulnerability and weakness. Hence, a petition like that of Rose Guegan in 1607 hit a number of marks – abandonment as her menfolk enlisted to serve, established status as deserving – in order to persuade the state to move payment from Galicia to Flanders.24 As Ciaran O’Scea has argued, exposure to this bureaucratic and creative process inculcated and spread literacy among the exiled community.25 It directed language skills not only toward the most successful arguments but also the Castilian Spanish of the state. The urgency of confronting and dealing with the English state (as also the continuity of its institutions of record) meant that women in Ireland also learned to frame their needs and positions in petitions. Among the most famous are the petitions addressed to Queen Elizabeth I and her secretary of state, William Cecil, by Gráinne Ní Mháille (Grace O’Malley, known to legend as the pirate queen). Chieftain of sea and land territories in Mayo, Ní Mháille clashed with the queen’s governor of Connacht, Richard Bingham, and this drove her to travel to London to entreat the monarch in person. Two visits, in 1593 and 1595, bolstered her submission of petitions. Unable to speak English, as was typical of the chieftain class in the sixteenth century, their composition was collaborative, marshalling and deciding arguments, aided by interpreters and scribes.26 Eleanor Butler, countess of Desmond, whose first husband was leader of two Munster risings, spent her career as influential wife, widow and mother addressing petitions to the upper branches of the crown. From the earliest days of her first husband’s ruptions, Eleanor attempted to soothe tensions by writing conciliatory and explanatory petitions to Elizabeth and her officers. On his execution as a traitor, her petitions shifted gear, aiming to limit the damage by securing some Desmond lands or, failing that, pensions for herself and her children; later, to support her son’s claim to the earldom over that of his uncle.27 Political adversity and warfare drove women of the upper social classes of all kinds to petition the state, and harness the instruments of writerly persuasion, for better circumstances. Where Ní Mháille was of noble Gaelic descent, and Desmond of Old English as well as Gaelic background, the later seventeenth-century petitions and letters of Elizabeth (née Preston) Butler, countess of Ormond, an English woman who had married into a Protestant ruling branch of the Old English Butlers, demonstrate fluency with Anglophone court and

Coolahan, ‘Writing before 1700’, A History of Modern Irish Women’s Literature (CUP, 2018), 18-36 literary culture. Nevertheless, political expediency also drove her writing. By the 1650s, the Ormonds were on the wrong, royalist, side of the Confederate and civil wars. From exile in Caen, France, Elizabeth acted as clearing house and agent, accepting and moving correspondence to her husband, former commander of royalist forces in Ireland. She was one of many who petitioned Oliver Cromwell. Difficult to pitch, this petition alighted on a distinction between petitioner and husband (who remained at large and in service to the exiled King Charles II) with a view to securing independent rights to her lands in Ireland. Deploying flattery and presenting a submissive persona, Butler exploited her gender by downplaying the claim to one of subsistence only, for herself and children. In fact, her political connections and fame as support to large numbers of victims fleeing through the port of Waterford post-1641, combined with her arguments to deliver success. Ormond was granted livings and land at Dunmore Castle, county Kilkenny, in 1653. The condition – that she discontinue communications with her husband – was surreptitiously ignored. A significant quantity of her letters survive, attesting to her engaged management of her estates in Ireland, as well as her maintenance of courtly and politically influential connections.28 As literary scholarship has embraced the study of letter writing so, too, the large number of letters authored by women in Ireland has come into view. These demonstrate a high degree of political agency as well as literacy; command of argument and contemporary political thought as well as epistolary convention and etiquette. Vincent Carey has shown how Mabel Browne, who had served Queen Mary, acted as mediator between the Geraldine and Tudor courts from her marriage to the eleventh earl of Kildare c.1555 through to the 1580s.29 We gain a glimpse of a Gaelic female leader’s political activism through the single surviving letter, in Irish, from Róis Ní Dhochartaigh. Another member of the Ulster expedition to the Continent in 1607, Ní Dhochartaigh was under English surveillance there as a spy. Her second husband, Owen Roe O’Neill, leader of the Irish regiment based at Flanders, returned in July 1642 to lead the Ulster army in the Confederate wars (Elizabeth Price, among others, recounts meeting him in her deposition). Róis’s letter, dated 16 September 1642, to an unidentified priest, kept tabs on her husband’s movements and shows how instrumental she was (not unlike Ormond) as an agent based abroad.30 The letters of one Mrs Briver, wife of the mayor of Waterford during that city’s siege at the hands of the Confederates in 1641-2 recently edited by Naomi McAreavey, are most notable for their informed manipulation of epistolary form in order to intervene publicly on behalf of her own reputation and that of her husband. Surviving in two different formats (a continuous narrative and a series of four letters), Briver’s versions of what had happened in the city – how rebels had behaved, how she and her husband resisted them and defended the English – were addressed to an officer of the English garrison at Duncannon.31 Writing as a member of the Old English community in the city, Briver evinces the complex entanglements of that hybrid identity. No such qualms of identity affected Susan (née Steynings) Montgomery, wife of the bishop of Derry, Raphoe and Clogher, appointed in 1605, who wrote home to her sister and brother-in-law in Devon. Her nine extant letters trace her experiences as a New English settler, reporting on the new country and encouraging her relatives to visit. Their trajectory runs from the positive outlook of the new arrival through to her isolated situation as wife of an important man who returned regularly to the London court. Her utter lack of agency, of ability to change her situation, shines through in letters of complaint. Writing was her only recourse, representing her plight to English relatives her only means of improving her lot.32 The next generation of settler-class women had been sufficiently educated and economically supported to engage fully with contemporary intellectual culture – although that engagement was predicated on residence elsewhere. Dorothy Moore, whose letters have been edited by Lynette Hunter, left Ireland for London and Utrecht soon after becoming a widow to Arthur Moore in 1635.33 She used her letters to make connections via the

Coolahan, ‘Writing before 1700’, A History of Modern Irish Women’s Literature (CUP, 2018), 18-36 correspondence network centred around Samuel Hartlib. Moore’s letters were the means by which she participated, working through her ideas about godly public service for women. Her closest epistolary confidants were the theologian, John Dury, who became her second husband in 1645, and Katherine Jones, viscountess Ranelagh. Jones was the seventh child of Richard Boyle, first earl of Cork. Her father had arrived in Ireland in 1588 with little money and few connections; for him, Ireland opened up vast opportunities and he attained great prominence. His offspring were illustrious and his success enabled them to maintain estates in both Ireland and England, reaching the highest echelons of politics and influence. Ranelagh operated at the centre of intellectual and political circles in London, esteemed and consulted for her expertise in medical, scientific and politico-religious matters.34 Ranelagh’s younger sister, Mary Rich, was also a prolific author. Her autobiography, composed 1671-3, recounts her marriage to a younger son of the earl of Warwick as a love match pursued against her father’s wishes. Ultimately, this marriage was to deliver both material and spiritual wealth; her husband inherited the title in 1659 and her life narrative interprets her introduction to his family as a prompt to religious conversion. Following the trajectory of spiritual autobiography advocated in puritan culture, this autobiography models the life as a journey toward salvation, election and grace, replete with ‘backslidings’ and a framing of the early life, distracted by books and theatre, as sinful.35 This narrative structure was replicated in the writings of many radical Protestants, for whom self-examination was a crucial marker of elect identity. The Independent, ‘gathered’ churches placed great emphasis on such narratives as admission testimonies. The church established by John Rogers at Christ Church, Dublin, in the early 1650s ministered mainly to Cromwellian soldiers and their families. It had a distinctively colonial Irish tenor at the vanguard of emergent radical culture that differentiated it from similar churches across England – or was presented as such by Rogers in his Ohel, or, Beth-shemesh (1653). The testimonies required to secure membership of the church followed, like Rich’s autobiography, a teleology from sin through to epiphany, peppered with many fits, starts, and backward steps. Rogers published thirty-seven of these, in order to stimulate others to extend that godly work in Ireland. This kind of life-writing was gender-blind; seventeen of Rogers’s published testimonies were authored by female members of his church.36 Frances Cook, who came to Ireland with her husband John (the lawyer who led King Charles I’s prosecution, recruited by Cromwell for his Irish conquest), was also prompted to author a narrative of spiritual revelation while in the country. Her near-death experience in a storm as they travelled by ship from Wexford to Cork in January 1650 led to a climax of assurance of salvation, for herself and her husband; they published their accounts together – justifications for God’s work as pursued by the Cromwellian regime.37 Other women who lived in Ireland for periods of their lives also incorporated Irish experiences in their narratives. The Quaker Barbara Blaugdone travelled to Cork in 1656. Her memoir recounts missions in that city as well as Dublin and Limerick – all ended in imprisonment due to the fervour (and even success) of her preaching.38 Less radical but equally concerned with personal reputation were the four different versions of her life that were written by Alice Thornton.39 Her childhood was spent at the Dublin court, as daughter of Lord Deputy Christopher Wandesford, who died unexpectedly in 1640. Writing and circulating her autobiographies in later life, she looked back on her time in Dublin as idyllic and used it as a literary counter-point to the trials and tribulations that followed from the family’s return to England. Ann Fanshawe was another traveller whose time in Ireland – an eventful year that saw the collapse of the royalist army in Ireland and triumphant campaign of Oliver Cromwell – was recounted in her memoir (ostensibly written as a biography of her husband, the royalist diplomat Sir Richard Fanshawe).40 The more prosaic struggles of life in Ireland may be sampled in the diaristic memoirs of Elizabeth Freke, whose battle with her husband over whether to live at his family estate in Rathbarry, county Cork, or on hers at

Coolahan, ‘Writing before 1700’, A History of Modern Irish Women’s Literature (CUP, 2018), 18-36

West Bilney, Norfolk persisted for many years in which she repented her secret marriage of 1672.41 For all these Anglophone life-writers, Ireland was a potent signifier of Catholicism – a gift to autobiographers and memoirists whose acts of writing were moulded and licensed by the tenets of Protestantism. The island’s semantic reach encompassed ideas of the tabula rasa, pulsing with possibilities that emerged from warfare and conflict. Their self- representations mined that symbolism and forged new kinds of women’s voices and identities on the island itself and for English audiences. But the voluminous diaries of Mary Rich remind us that the protagonist of life-writing is no more transparent than any other authorial persona. Unconcerned with life in Ireland, which she had long left behind, focused rather on devotional practice and domestic life, they detail a version of the latter at stark odds with the love match represented in her autobiography.42 The persona is always a construction, whether framed and shaped for the addressee of a petition or the reader (even oneself) of a diary. We may more readily read poetry as mediated and the Anglophone poetry produced by women living in early modern Ireland runs the gamut from plain piety to courtly sociability. Frances Cook’s near-shipwreck also prompted her to compose poetry. Her 24- stanza poem in ballad metre reworks Psalms 66 and 107 in order to praise God for saving her.43 The lyricism of the biblical psalms’ first-person voice made psalm paraphrase approachable and enabling for women writers, as evidenced also in the verse of Anne Southwell.44 Anglophone poets such as Southwell and Katherine Philips arrived in Ireland having honed their poetic skills in the court and coterie culture of England and Wales. Southwell arrived at the Munster plantation with her first husband at the turn of the seventeenth century. An accomplished and committed poet, she sought connections with like- minded members of her class, advocating devotional verse, addressing and soliciting poems to and from Bernard Adams, bishop of Limerick; Cecily Ridgeway, countess of Londonderry; and the popular religious poet Francis Quarles, who arrived in 1626 as secretary to James Ussher, archbishop of Armagh. She also composed sequences of Decalogue poetry (poems inspired by the ten commandments). One of these bears the traces of her isolated experience as devout Protestant at a far-flung outpost of the colony as the speaker worries what will happen ‘Yf in Hibernia god will haue mee dye’.45 The best known today of the writers discussed in this chapter is Katherine Philips, ‘the matchless Orinda’, whose collected poems and translations were published posthumously in 1667. This Anglo-Welsh poet came to Ireland in 1662 with an already established literary reputation. She accompanied her friend Anne Owen (immortalized as ‘Lucasia’ in Philips’s verse), who had married Colonel Marcus Trevor, viscount Dungannon. She also intended to pursue her father’s 1642 investment in Cromwell’s ‘adventurers’ scheme for funding the army in Ireland. Her connections provided Philips with an entrée to the Dublin court, where her literary ambitions were progressed and supported – most prominently by Roger Boyle, earl of Orrery (brother to Mary Rich and Katherine, Lady Ranelagh), who urged her to complete her translation of Corneille’s 1643 play, La mort de Pompée (‘The Death of Pompey’). Philips’s Pompey was performed at Smock Alley Theatre, Dublin, in February 1663. A dramatization of the fallout from the Roman civil war, the play’s exploration of the politics of loyalty and competing interests of periphery (Egypt) and centre (Rome), it has been analysed in terms of its complex Restoration Irish contexts.46 The apex of Philips’s career, the play was printed both in Dublin and London to great acclaim. Her social verse addressed the aristocratic women of Dublin society; her poems were copied and circulated in manuscript to the London court as well as in print, with those of Abraham Cowley and Orrery, among others, in the miscellany Poems, by Several Persons (1663). Her celebrity thus increased, Philips’s period in Dublin enhanced her reputation in London. She also inspired a remarkable and substantial praise poem, apparently by a contemporary female

Coolahan, ‘Writing before 1700’, A History of Modern Irish Women’s Literature (CUP, 2018), 18-36 poet, known only as Philo-Philippa. Long a source of attraction and bemusement to critics, this poem is strikingly modern in its proto-feminist sensibilities and that very modernity has caused some to question its authenticity as a female-authored poem.47 However, the terrain of women’s writing before 1700 is substantially populated by single surviving, accomplished and apparently unique texts: Brighid Fitzgerald’s syllabic poem, Fionnghuala Ní Bhriain’s keen, Róis Ní Dhochartaigh’s letter. Their survival suggests they were not the only female-authored texts produced in their communities, nor even the only authors. Another example of seemingly isolated survival is provided by the two Latin praise poems in honour of her father by Eleanora Burnell – the only known Latin poems by an Irish woman in the early modern period. Printed as prefatory poems to her father’s play, Landgartha, in 1641, they may be unique in an Irish context but, as Jane Stevenson has shown, they are best understood in the wider European context of women and elite cultural practices.48 These traces of women’s participation in a culture of writing, reading and performance point not just to their immersion in the various cross-cutting cultures lived on the island but also to their consistency with developments across Europe, themselves varied in form and function – vernacular song and answer poetry, nuns’ record-keeping, petitionary and bureaucratic writing, news-gathering and dissemination, coterie and neo-Latin verse. Women’s writing in early modern Ireland problematizes categories of identity, national as well as ethnic or religious. The better-known Anglophone writers discussed in this chapter are more usually considered within an Anglocentric canon of British women’s writing. Those women knew both islands and their writing was shaped by their competing origins and destinations. The shift in scholarship toward ‘archipelagic’ perspectives offers one route for accommodating these forces’ influences.49 For scholars of early modern Ireland, these writers – already occupying marginalized speaking positions due to their sex – can illuminate the interrogation of fluid and emergent ideas of national identity and ‘Irishness’. Their multiple poles of identity – language, region, religion, political allegiance – can fruitfully be interpreted through the prism of feminist intersectionality. Finally, the apparent paucity of texts continues to drive recovery research. Prose – particularly the genres of letters and life-writing – is most likely to yield new discoveries and scholarly attention. As fields of scholarship that have emerged over the past decade, the rediscovery and reappraisal of such texts is ongoing for historians of early modern women’s writing in Europe as well as Ireland.50 Writing in Irish includes a small but significant body of poetry, as well as documents commissioned by a female religious community as part of the Counter- Reformation drive to provide instruction in vernacular languages. Writing in English ranges from the work of Katherine Philips and Dorothy Moore to petition-letters and depositions. In a context in which structures of power were in flux and new identities were being forged, women from different communities co-existing in Ireland used writing for both communal and individual ends, as a means to conform with and diverge from their social milieux. In the process, they contributed to the reshaping of genres and created new prospects for female authorship.

Notes

1 Máirín Ní Dhonnchadha, ‘Courts and Coteries I: c.900-1600’ and ‘Courts and Coteries II: c.1500-1800’, in Angela Bourke et al., eds., The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing: Irish Women’s Writing and Traditions (Cork: Cork University Press, 2002), 4: 293-303, 358-66; for these women, see 111-18, 299-300, 303-5, 133-9. 2 Lambert McKenna, ed., The Book of Magauran: Leabhar Méig Shamhradháin (Dublin: DIAS, 1947), 237/379.

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3 William J. Watson, ed., Scottish Verse from the Book of the Dean of Lismore (Edinburgh: Scottish Gaelic Texts Society, 1937), 244-5. 4 National Archives, London, SP 63/3/67. 5 Lambeth Palace Library, London, MS 627, cited in Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, 4:302. 6 See Michelle O Riordan, Irish Bardic Poetry and Rhetorical Reality (Cork: Cork University Press, 2007); Osborn Bergin, Irish Bardic Poetry (Dublin: DIAS, 1970). 7 For this discussion and text, see Cathal Ó Háinle, ‘Flattery Rejected: Two Seventeenth- Century Irish Poems’, Hermathena 138 (1985): 5-27; Ní Dhonnchadha, ‘Courts and Coteries: II’, 384, 388; Jane Stevenson and Peter Davidson, Early Modern Women Poets (1520-1700): An Anthology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 165; Mícheál Mac Craith, ‘Fun and Games among the Jet Set: A Glimpse of Seventeenth-Century Gaelic Ireland’, in Joseph Falaky Nagy, ed., Memory and the Modern in Celtic Literatures (Dublin: Four Courts, 2006), 15-36. 8 Watson, Dean of Lismore, 60-1, 234-5, 307-8; Catherine Kerrigan, ed., An Anthology of Scottish Women Poets (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1991), 53, 60-1; E. C. Quiggin, Poems from the Book of the Dean of Lismore, ed. J. C. Fraser (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1937), 78. 9 For surveys of women’s patronage, see Bernadette Cunningham, ‘Women and Gaelic Literature, 1500-1800’, in Margaret MacCurtain and Mary O’Dowd, eds., Women in Early Modern Ireland (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1991), 148-52; Ní Dhonnchadha, ‘Courts and Coteries: I’, 332-40. 10 Tadhg Ó Donnchadha, ed., Leabhar Cloinne Aodha Buidhe (Dublin: Irish Manuscripts Commission, 1931), 171, 179, 203-17. 11 Russell Library, Maynooth University, MS M 107, pp. 193-211. Those on Donnchadh and Diarmaid are edited, with translations, by Liam P. Ó Murchú, in Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, 4:399-405. 12 For editions, see Liam P. Ó Murchú, ‘Caoineadh ar Uaithne Mór Ó Lochlainn, 1617’, Éigse 27 (1993): 67-79; Field Day, IV: 396-7; Stevenson and Davidson, Early Modern Women Poets, 175-8. For discussion of the keen’s petitionary aspects, see Máirín Nic Eoin, B’ait leo bean: Gnéithe den Idé-eolaíocht Inscne i dTraidisiún Liteartha na Gaeilge (Dublin: An Clóchomhar, 1998), 246-7. 13 Cecile O’Rahilly, ed., Cath Finntrágha: Edited from MS. Rawlinson B 487 (Dublin: DIAS, 1962); Royal Irish Academy MS 24 P 25; Salvador Ryan, ‘Windows on Late Medieval Devotional Practice: Máire Ní Mháille’s “Book of Piety” (1513) and the World Behind the Texts’, in Rachel Moss, Colmán Ó Clabaigh and Salvador Ryan, eds., Art and Devotion in Late Medieval Ireland (Dublin: Four Courts), 1-15; Paul Walsh, Irish Men of Learning (Dublin: At the Sign of the Three Candles, 1947), 172-4. 14 Bibliothèque Royale, Brussels, MS 6131-3. See also Jerrold Casway, ‘Heroines or Victims? The Women of the Flight of the Earls’, New Hibernia Review: Iris Éireannach Nua 7 (2003): 64-7; Walsh, Men of Learning, 179-205; Nic Eoin, B’ait leo bean, 162-5. 15 Royal Irish Academy, MS D i 2; Eleanor Knott, ed., ‘An Irish Seventeenth-Century Translation of the Rule of St. Clare’, Ériu 15 (1948): 1-187. 16 Joanne à s. Antonio Salmantino, Bibliotheca universa franciscana, 3 vols. (Madrid, 1732; repr. Farnborough: Gregg Press, 1966), 2:328. 17 Chronicle of Mother Mary Bonaventure Browne, MS, Galway Monastery of the Poor Clares; Celsus O’Brien, ed., Recollections of an Irish Poor Clare in the Seventeenth Century (Galway: Connacht Tribute, 1993).

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18 See Marie-Louise Coolahan, ‘“And this deponent further sayeth”: Orality, Print and the 1641 Depositions’, in Marc Caball and Andrew Carpenter, eds., Oral and Print Cultures in Ireland 1600-1900 (Dublin: Four Courts, 2010), 72-3. 19 John Temple, The Irish Rebellion (London, 1646), sig. Ff2v; Bodleian Library, Oxford, Carte MS II, fol. 305; William Bladen, A True and Exact Relation of the Chiefe Passages in Ireland, since the First Rising of the Rebels (London, 1642). See also Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, 5:25-7. 20 Trinity College Dublin, MS 814, fols. 71r-74r; 117, 168r-171v. These texts occur twice in the manuscript; the second iteration is the version available at 1641 Depositions Online: http://1641.tcd.ie/deposition.php?depID=814117r067a accessed 27 January 2017. 21 TCD MSS 836, fols. 101-105 http://1641.tcd.ie/deposition.php?depID=836101r054 accessed 27 January 2017; 830, fols. 136-7 http://1641.tcd.ie/deposition.php?depID=830136r106 accessed 27 January 2017]. 22 TCD MS 829, fols. 138-9 http://1641.tcd.ie/deposition.php?depID=829138r082 accessed 27 January 2017; British Library, London, Sloane MS 1008, fols. 66r-69r; also The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, 5:22-4. 23 For recent discussions of the depositions, see Nicholas Canny, Making Ireland British 1580-1650 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 461-550; Raymond Gillespie, ‘Temple’s Fate: Reading The Irish Rebellion in Late Seventeenth-Century Ireland’, in Ciaran Brady and Jane Ohlmeyer, eds., British Interventions in Early Modern Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 315-33; David Edwards, Pádraig Lenihan and Clodagh Tait, eds., Age of Atrocity: Violence and Political Conflict in Early Modern Ireland (Dublin: Four Courts, 2007); Eamon Darcy, Annaleigh Margey and Elaine Murphy, eds., The 1641 Depositions and the Irish Rebellion (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2012); Eamon Darcy, The Irish Rebellion of 1641 and the Wars of the Three Kingdoms (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2013). 24 The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, 5:570. 25 Ciaran O’Scea, ‘The Role of Castilian Royal Bureaucracy in the Formation of Early- Modern Irish Literacy’, in Thomas O’Connor and Mary Ann Lyons, eds., Irish Communities in Early Modern Europe (Dublin: Four Courts, 2006), 200-39. 26 National Archives, London, SP 63/170/64-5; SP 63/179/36; SP 63/170/70. See also Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, 5:21-2; Anne Chambers, Granuaile: The Life and Times of Grace O’Malley c.1530-1603 (Dublin: Wolfhound, 1988); Brandie Siegfried, ‘Queen to Queen at Check: Grace O’Malley, Elizabeth Tudor, and the Discourse of Majesty in the State Papers of Ireland’, in Carole Levin, Jo Eldridge Carney and Debra Barrett-Graves, eds., Elizabeth I: Always Her Own Free Woman (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), 149-75. 27 For examples, see The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, 5:16-19 and Anne Chambers, Eleanor, Countess of Desmond, c.1545-1638 (Dublin: Wolfhound, 1986). 28 For examples, see The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, 5:501-3; British Library, London, Egerton MS 2534, fols. 17, 26, 30-1, 44-5, 57, 129-31. Naomi McAreavey is editing her complete letters for the Renaissance English Text Society. 29 Vincent Carey, ‘“What’s love got to do with it?:” Gender and Geraldine Power on the Pale Border’, in Michael Potterton and Thomas Herron, eds., Dublin and the Pale in the Renaissance c.1540-1660 (Dublin: Four Courts, 2011), 93-103. 30 The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, 5:30. 31 Naomi McAreavey, ‘An Epistolary Account of the Irish Rising of 1641 by the Wife of the Mayor of Waterford’, English Literary Renaissance 42 (2012): 77-109. 32 Marie-Louise Coolahan, ‘Ideal Communities and Planter Women’s Writing in Seventeenth-Century Ireland’, Parergon 29 (2012): 69-91. 33 Lynette Hunter, ed., The Letters of Dorothy Moore, 1612-64 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004). 11

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34 See Michelle DiMeo, ‘“Such a Sister Became Such a Brother”: Lady Ranelagh’s Influence on Robert Boyle’, Intellectual History Review 25 (2015): 21-36; Carol Pal, Republic of Women: Rethinking the Republic of Letters in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 142-76; Ruth Connolly, ‘A Proselytising Protestant Commonwealth: The Religious and Political Ideals of Katherine Jones, Viscountess Ranelagh’, The Seventeenth Century 23 (2008): 244-64; Betsey Taylor Fitzsimon, ‘Conversion, the Bible, and the Irish Language: The Correspondence of Lady Ranelagh and Bishop Dopping’, in Michael Brown, Charles McGrath and Thomas Power, eds., Converts and Conversion in Ireland, 1650-1850 (Dublin: Four Courts, 2005), 157-82; and Evan Bourke, ‘Female Involvement, Membership, and Centrality: A Social Network Analysis of the Hartlib Circle’, Literature Compass, 14 (2017): doi:10.1111/lic3.12388. 35 British Library, London, Additional MS 27,357; Thomas Crofton Croker, ed., Autobiography of Mary Countess of Warwick (London: Percy Society, 1848). 36 John Rogers, Ohel, or, Beth-shemesh (London, 1653), 393-417 (sigs. Eeer-Hhh3r). 37 Frances Cook, Mris. Cookes Meditations and John Cook, A True Relation of Mr. Iohn Cook’s Passage by Sea from Wexford to Kinsale in that Great Storm (Cork and London, 1650). 38 Barbara Blaugdone, An Account of the Travels, Sufferings and Persecutions of Barbara Blaugdone (London, 1691). 39 Yale University Microfilm no. 326; British Library, London, Additional MS 88,897; British Library, London, RP2346; British Library, London, RP5757; Charles Jackson, ed., The Autobiography of Mrs. Alice Thornton (Durham: Surtees Society, 1875). See Raymond Anselment, ‘Seventeenth-Century Manuscript Sources of Alice Thornton’s Life’, Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 45 (2005): 135-55. 40 John Loftis, ed., The Memoirs of Anne, Lady Halkett and Ann, Lady Fanshawe (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979). 41 Raymond Anselment, ed., The Remembrances of Elizabeth Freke: 1671-1714 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 42 British Library, London, Additional MSS 27,351-5 and 27,356 for her diaries and meditations; Memoirs of Lady Warwick: Also her Diary (London: Religious Tract Society, 1847); Raymond Anselment, ed., The Occasional Meditations of Mary Rich, Countess of Warwick (Tempe, AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2009). 43 Cook, Meditations, 14-16; Suzanne Trill, Kate Chedgzoy and Melanie Osborne, eds., Lay By your Needles Ladies, Take the Pen: Writing Women in England, 1500-1700 (London: Arnold, 1997), 169-75. 44 Sarah C. E. Ross, Women, Poetry, and Politics in Seventeenth-Century Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 80-96. 45 Jean Klene, ed., The Southwell-Sibthorpe Commonplace Book: Folger MS V.b.198 (Tempe, AZ: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1997), p. 132. 46 See, for example, Catharine Gray, ‘Katherine Philips in Ireland’, English Literary Renaissance 39 (2009): 557-85 and Deana Rankin, ‘“If Egypt now enslav’d or free A Kingdom or a Province be:” Translating Corneille in Restoration Dublin’, in Sarah Alyn Stacey and Véronique Desnain, eds., Culture and Conflict in Seventeenth-Century France and Ireland (Dublin: Four Courts, 2004), 194-209. For Philips’s work, see Patrick Thomas, G. Greer and R. Little, eds., The Collected Works of Katherine Philips: The Matchless Orinda, 3 vols. (Essex: Stump Cross, 1990-3). 47 Andrew Carpenter, ed., Verse in English from Tudor and Stuart Ireland (Cork: Cork University Press, 2003), 367-73, and unpublished paper, ‘Katherine Philips’s Dublin Admirers: “Philo-Philippa” Unmasked’, Katherine Philips 350: Writing, Reputation, Legacy conference, Marsh’s Library, Dublin, 27 June 2014; Kate Lilley, ‘Katherine Philips, “Philo- 12

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Philippa” and the Poetics of Association’, in Patricia Pender and Rosalind Smith, eds., Material Cultures of Early Modern Women’s Writing (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 118-39. 48 Deana Rankin, ed., Landgartha: A Tragie-Comedy (Dublin: Four Courts, 2013), 74-7; Jane Stevenson, Women Latin Poets: Language, Gender, and Authority from Antiquity to the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 384-5. 49 Kate Chedgzoy, Women’s Writing in the British Atlantic World: Memory, Place and History, 1550-1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); John Kerrigan, Archipelagic English: Literature, History, and Politics 1603-1707 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). 50 For example, Julie D. Campbell and Anne R. Larsen, eds., Early Modern Women and Transnational Communities of Letters (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009); Michelle M. Dowd and Julie A. Eckerle, eds., Genre and Women’s Life Writing in Early Modern England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007); Jane Couchman and Ann Crabb, eds., Women’s Letters Across Europe, 1400-1700: Form and Persuasion (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005).