Tradition Transformed: Bardic Poetry and Colonialism in Early Modern Ireland, c.1560-1660

FAIN: FEL-262924-19

Sarah Elizabeth McKibben
University of Notre Dame (Notre Dame, IN 46556-4635)

Completion of a book-length study on Irish bardic poetry and British colonialism in Early Modern Ireland.

This project offers a sequence of historicized close readings of early modern Irish bardic poems that confront epochal social change with political savvy, pathos and wit. Long the high-status defenders of native norms, Ireland’s bardic master-poets became targets of the aggrandizing Tudor-Stuart state, joining their lords in insurgency or strategic accommodation. The resulting creative ferment—the grimmer, Irish version of the Renaissance—drew upon deep intellectual roots to formulate a complex response to the unfolding colonial cataclysm that vindicated traditional learning, defended Irish civility and critiqued English impositions, thus remaking bardic tradition. Once represented as stubbornly resistant to change and oblivious to larger political transformation, still rarely included in mainstream discussions of early modern Ireland, bardic poets emerge as both compelling change agents and tradition bearers whose voices critically define this dramatic period in Irish history.