Provided by the author(s) and NUI Galway in accordance with publisher policies. Please cite the published version when available. 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 Downloaded 2021-09-26T20:31:08Z Some rights reserved. For more information, please see the item record link above. 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 1 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, 2 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.