A Landscape of Words: Ireland, Britain, and the Poetics of Irish Space, 700-1300

FAIN: FA-233245-16

Amy C. Mulligan
University of Notre Dame (Notre Dame, IN 46556-4635)

A book-length study on how topography in medieval Irish literature reflects authors' responses to events that threatened Irish land, sovereignty, and language.

Ireland is the only medieval European nation that formalized a distinct and substantive genre of “place-lore,” yet medieval Irish spatial discourses have received virtually no attention.  My project is the first to consider the full range of Ireland's medieval topographical literature (Latin and Irish, 700-1300), written by Irish and British authors, and to identify a unique Irish poetics of space and place. Through topographical discourses, the Irish disseminated a story of themselves as a unified people and ultimately, a nation; writers in Britain, from Anglo-Saxon Bede to the colonizing Cambro-Norman Giraldus Cambrensis, also relied on a poetics of Irish place to define Britain and English identity.  Situated in different linguistic, textual, and national traditions, the several discourses on medieval Ireland and its geography have rarely been linked in scholarly conversations; my study fills this critical gap by analyzing Irish geospatial writing from multiple periods and perspectives.

Associated Products

A Landscape of Words: Ireland, Britain, and the Poetics of Irish Space from 700-1250 (Book)
Title: A Landscape of Words: Ireland, Britain, and the Poetics of Irish Space from 700-1250
Author: Amy C. Mulligan
Abstract: Living on an island at the very edge of the known world, the medieval Irish were in a unique position to examine the spaces of the North Atlantic region and contemplate how location shapes a people. Experiencing this geography in many ways– as monastic peregrini and penitent pilgrims, as ambitious dynasts pursuing political expansion, as subjects of English conquest – the Irish translated the world around them into narratives about their identity and transnational character, and an immense body of poetry and prose, in Irish and Latin, from ca. 700-1250, verbally maps out Ireland, Britain and the North Atlantic archipelago. Landscape of Words shows that the texts produced by and about the medieval Irish contain perhaps the highest concentration of literary topographies in both Irish literary history and in the wider medieval European milieu: only in Ireland was a distinct genre of placelore formalized and popularized. Nonetheless, medieval Irish spatial discourses have up to now received virtually no attention. In Landscape of Words I trace the generation, dissemination, and deployment of this well-developed medieval poetics of Ireland and the North Atlantic region more broadly. The medieval Irish did not only innovate significantly in developing a geospatial literature. In theorizing the process and its implications, medieval Irish thinkers also enacted a medieval ‘spatial turn’ that profoundly influenced other literatures of the North Sea region from 700-1250. Through focused studies of important texts (Navigatio Sancti Brendani, Immram Máel Duin and vernacular voyage tales, Táin Bó Cuailnge, Acallam na Senórach, Gerald of Wales’s Topographia Hiberniae, accounts of St. Patrick’s Purgatory), Landscape of Words places the theories and poetics of Irish place developed over six centuries— in response to a variety of political, cultural, religious and economic changes —into the bigger theoretical picture of studies of space, landscape and environmental writing.
Year: 2017
Type: Single author monograph
Copy sent to NEH?: No

A Landscape of Words: Ireland, Britain and the Poetics of Irish Space from 700-1250 (Book)
Title: A Landscape of Words: Ireland, Britain and the Poetics of Irish Space from 700-1250
Author: Amy C. Mulligan
Abstract: Living on an island at the very edge of the known world, the medieval Irish were in a unique position to examine the spaces of the North Atlantic region and contemplate how location shapes a people. Experiencing this geography in many ways– as monastic peregrini and penitent pilgrims, as ambitious dynasts pursuing political expansion, as subjects of English conquest – the Irish translated the world around them into narratives about their identity and transnational character, and an immense body of poetry and prose, in Irish and Latin, from ca. 700-1250, verbally maps out Ireland, Britain and the North Atlantic archipelago. Landscape of Words shows that the texts produced by and about the medieval Irish contain perhaps the highest concentration of literary topographies in both Irish literary history and in the wider medieval European milieu: only in Ireland was a distinct genre of placelore formalized and popularized. Nonetheless, medieval Irish spatial discourses have up to now received virtually no attention. In Landscape of Words I trace the generation, dissemination, and deployment of this well-developed medieval poetics of Ireland and the North Atlantic region more broadly. The medieval Irish did not only innovate significantly in developing a geospatial literature. In theorizing the process and its implications, medieval Irish thinkers also enacted a medieval ‘spatial turn’ that profoundly influenced other literatures of the North Sea region from 700-1250. Through focused studies of important texts (Navigatio Sancti Brendani, Immram Máel Duin and vernacular voyage tales, Táin Bó Cuailnge, Acallam na Senórach, Gerald of Wales’s Topographia Hiberniae, accounts of St. Patrick’s Purgatory), Landscape of Words places the theories and poetics of Irish place developed over six centuries— in response to a variety of political, cultural, religious and economic changes —into the bigger theoretical picture of studies of space, landscape and environmental writing.
Year: 2018
Publisher: not yet contracted
Type: Single author monograph

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