Language and Conquest in Early Modern Ireland: English Renaissance Literature and Elizabethan Imperial Expansion

The Elizabethan conquest of Ireland sparked off two linguistic events of enduring importance: it initiated the language shift from Irish to English, which constitutes the great drama of Irish cultural history, and it marked the beginnings of English linguistic expansion. The Elizabethan colonisers in Ireland included some of the leading poets and translators of the day. In Language and Conquest in Early Modern Ireland, Patricia Palmer uses their writings, as well as material from the State Papers, to explore the part which language played in shaping colonial ideology and English national identity. Palmer shows how manoeuvres of linguistic expansion rehearsed in Ireland shaped Englishmen’s encounters with the languages of the New World, and frames that analysis within a comparison between English linguistic colonisation and Spanish practice in the New World. This is an ambitious, comparative study which will interest literary and political historians.

• This is first work to explore the origins of English linguistic colonisation in Ireland • The book shows how the Elizabethan conquest of Ireland set a pattern of linguistic colonisation that shaped the future direction of English imperial language policy • The book offers a comparative perspective, by setting English linguistic colonisation in the context of Spanish expansion in the New World

Abbreviations; Introduction; 1. Conquest, colonial ideologies and the consequences for language; 2. ‘A bad dream with no sound’: the representation of Irish in the text of the Elizabethan conquest; 3. ‘Wilde speech’: Elizabethan evaluations of Irish; 4. ‘Translating this kingdom of the new’: English linguistic nationalism and Anglicization policy in Ireland; 5. New world, new incomprehension: patterns of change and continuity in the English encounter with native languages from Munster to Manoa; 6. The clamorous silence; Conclusion; Glossary; Bibliography.

‘A fine study … a nuanced and densely layered work.’ Times Literary Supplement

‘Patricia Palmer’s important book … is passionately committed but never loses sight of hardheaded scholarship and manages to be both engaging and angrily polemical.’ Modern Language Review