Bradin Cormack
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- February 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780226116242
- eISBN:
- 9780226116259
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226116259.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, 16th-century and Renaissance Literature
Focusing on late Elizabethan England, this chapter analyzes Books 5 and 6 of Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene (1596) in light of the Elizabethan attempts to imagine in colonial Ireland a place for ...
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Focusing on late Elizabethan England, this chapter analyzes Books 5 and 6 of Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene (1596) in light of the Elizabethan attempts to imagine in colonial Ireland a place for English common law. It focuses on the pressure applied by England's colonialist policy on two terms, common and custom, through which English lawyers celebrated the common law as it operated in England. Early modern Ireland presented a special problem in this regard, in that the customary Brehon law, which the colonizers were eager to displace for both symbolic and practical reasons, had to be imagined in opposition to English common law. Spenser deploys the generic resources of pastoral to rethink the status of property, this being one step in a program to implement the imperfectly coherent law through which English appropriations of Irish land could be rationalized. In the same vein, Spenser's allegory comes to stand for the system of interpretive coercion that transformed law's accommodation of jurisdictional difference into an administrative initiative to identify a distinct Irish legal identity only in order to suppress it.Less
Focusing on late Elizabethan England, this chapter analyzes Books 5 and 6 of Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene (1596) in light of the Elizabethan attempts to imagine in colonial Ireland a place for English common law. It focuses on the pressure applied by England's colonialist policy on two terms, common and custom, through which English lawyers celebrated the common law as it operated in England. Early modern Ireland presented a special problem in this regard, in that the customary Brehon law, which the colonizers were eager to displace for both symbolic and practical reasons, had to be imagined in opposition to English common law. Spenser deploys the generic resources of pastoral to rethink the status of property, this being one step in a program to implement the imperfectly coherent law through which English appropriations of Irish land could be rationalized. In the same vein, Spenser's allegory comes to stand for the system of interpretive coercion that transformed law's accommodation of jurisdictional difference into an administrative initiative to identify a distinct Irish legal identity only in order to suppress it.
Andrew Gibson
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- May 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780813054742
- eISBN:
- 9780813053301
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University Press of Florida
- DOI:
- 10.5744/florida/9780813054742.003.0008
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
This essay analyzes scenes from Ulysses alongside the legal regimes governing tenancy in 1904 Ireland. Summarizing the historical conflict between Brehon law and colonial versions of tenancy, Gibson ...
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This essay analyzes scenes from Ulysses alongside the legal regimes governing tenancy in 1904 Ireland. Summarizing the historical conflict between Brehon law and colonial versions of tenancy, Gibson shows James Joyce's ambivalence about both, and argues that Ulysses exposes the social and class disaster that was rentier culture in early 1900s Dublin.Less
This essay analyzes scenes from Ulysses alongside the legal regimes governing tenancy in 1904 Ireland. Summarizing the historical conflict between Brehon law and colonial versions of tenancy, Gibson shows James Joyce's ambivalence about both, and argues that Ulysses exposes the social and class disaster that was rentier culture in early 1900s Dublin.
Galena Hashhozheva
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- July 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780198767114
- eISBN:
- 9780191821301
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780198767114.003.0004
- Subject:
- Classical Studies, Literary Studies: Classical, Early, and Medieval, Asian and Middle Eastern History: BCE to 500CE
In early modernity, the ancient Scythians were mostly the subject of ethnographic tales that delighted audiences with their exoticism and barbarity. Yet in an exceptional development, one ...
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In early modernity, the ancient Scythians were mostly the subject of ethnographic tales that delighted audiences with their exoticism and barbarity. Yet in an exceptional development, one stereotypical Scythian trait—the resistance to foreign cultural influences—became associated with a wider sixteenth-century discourse about custom in its philosophical, religious, and legal dimensions. This discourse was utilized in the service of imperialist agendas that had to reckon with the durability and obduracy of native culture. In Edmund Spenser’s colonial dialogue A View of the State of Ireland, the Irish are presented as genealogical descendants of the Scythians and are reviled for adhering to their Scythian-like customs. Paradoxically drawing on Herodotus and Lucian, authors largely sympathetic to the Scythians, Spenser allows the cultural conservatism of the colonized to illuminate what he perceives as the cultural degeneracy of the colonists, and turns the quarrel about ethnographic custom into an interrogation of customary law.Less
In early modernity, the ancient Scythians were mostly the subject of ethnographic tales that delighted audiences with their exoticism and barbarity. Yet in an exceptional development, one stereotypical Scythian trait—the resistance to foreign cultural influences—became associated with a wider sixteenth-century discourse about custom in its philosophical, religious, and legal dimensions. This discourse was utilized in the service of imperialist agendas that had to reckon with the durability and obduracy of native culture. In Edmund Spenser’s colonial dialogue A View of the State of Ireland, the Irish are presented as genealogical descendants of the Scythians and are reviled for adhering to their Scythian-like customs. Paradoxically drawing on Herodotus and Lucian, authors largely sympathetic to the Scythians, Spenser allows the cultural conservatism of the colonized to illuminate what he perceives as the cultural degeneracy of the colonists, and turns the quarrel about ethnographic custom into an interrogation of customary law.
Peter Leary
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- August 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780198778578
- eISBN:
- 9780191823886
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198778578.003.0003
- Subject:
- History, British and Irish Early Modern History, Social History
The backstory to the establishment of the Foyle Fisheries Commission by joint legislation of both Irish parliaments in 1952 was a conflict over salmon fishing on the Lough and River Foyle. For most ...
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The backstory to the establishment of the Foyle Fisheries Commission by joint legislation of both Irish parliaments in 1952 was a conflict over salmon fishing on the Lough and River Foyle. For most of its length the Foyle corresponds with the border. After partition both states laid claim to the waters. Exclusive fishing rights had long been claimed by the Irish Society—an offshoot of the Corporation of London. Territorial uncertainty allowed local men, from both sides of the border, to question the society’s title to private property, in ways that transcended the argument between the states themselves. This localized clash became part of the evolving relationship between Ireland and Britain, between North and South, and between the British and Irish states. Questions of class and property were intertwined with concrete experiences of nationhood, state, and sovereignty, as well as with the complex legacies of colonization and its uneven demise.Less
The backstory to the establishment of the Foyle Fisheries Commission by joint legislation of both Irish parliaments in 1952 was a conflict over salmon fishing on the Lough and River Foyle. For most of its length the Foyle corresponds with the border. After partition both states laid claim to the waters. Exclusive fishing rights had long been claimed by the Irish Society—an offshoot of the Corporation of London. Territorial uncertainty allowed local men, from both sides of the border, to question the society’s title to private property, in ways that transcended the argument between the states themselves. This localized clash became part of the evolving relationship between Ireland and Britain, between North and South, and between the British and Irish states. Questions of class and property were intertwined with concrete experiences of nationhood, state, and sovereignty, as well as with the complex legacies of colonization and its uneven demise.
