Thomas Herron

Let Poets feed on aire, or what they wiU;Let me feed fuU, tiU that I fart, sayes Jill.(Herrick 216-17)Literary criticism has long been divided between privileging (and attempting to identify) material causes as the source of (and reason for) the creation of a uterary work, as opposed to emphasizing a work's otherworldly and /or moral significance as its main inspiration and reason for being. This critical division continues in MacFaul' s Uvely analysis of three "micro-epics" (or epyllions), Edmund Spenser's "Muiopotmos: or The Fate of the Butterflie" (1595), Ben Jonson's Epigram CXXXIII ("On the Famous Voyage") (1616) and William Davenant's " Jeff er eidos, on the Captivity of Jeffery" (1638). MacFaul's light capering between the creative-critical poles of earth and air - material vs. spiritual causation - leaves this reader puzzled, however, and asking for more sustained and consistent analysis.At stake, furthermore, i...

This essay builds on insights into Malecasta’s wanton character to examine her politicized meaning in the allegory of The Faerie Queene Books I–III, as a discourteous and inhospitable threat to the idealized “British” and chaste woman warrior represented by Britomart. Malecasta represents in her bad rule of Castle Joyous (III.i) social pollution with a proto-racial emphasis, that is, degeneration. An unnoticed cognate with Malecasta’s punning name is the Spanish malecasta, to be of “mixed race.” As such, Malecasta in her “bower” appears to allegorize on one level the corrupting influence of Spanish and Continental romances, including those with Irish subject matter, and, on a political level, the Continental-leaning, colonial Old English culture found in Spenser’s Ireland: old noble houses that had intermingled with the Irish, grown and decayed over centuries through excess wealth and power. Comparisons are made with Acrasia in the Bower of Bliss to demonstrate how Britomart in Castle Joyous must not only resist her own sexualized nature but must avoid being pulled down to the muddy level of Malecasta’s corrupted social sphere.

The satire of court corruption in the third episode of Mother Hubberds Tale has traditionally been read as referring allegorically to the English court. Certain signifiers have been overlooked, however, that turn our attention to intertwined Scottish and Irish politics as well. The poem would appear to sympathize with the travails of Nicholas Dawtry, the New English captain in Ireland and ambassador to the Scottish court. It may also condemn the “wilde” powers granted to the queen’s cousin, Thomas Butler, earl of Ormond, whose coat-of-arms is found therein.

Centering Spenser can be found here: http://core.ecu.edu/umc/Munster/index.html This iBook showcases many illustrations and select subject matter taken directly from Centering Spenser: a digital resource for Kilcolman Castle. Only the Preface and Chapter 5, on Virtual Reality developments, are wholly original to the iBook. New illustration formatting not found on the website has been created for the iBook, including schematic diagrams of interior rooms. This book, like the website, is written and designed by Thomas Herron, with the exception of “Modeling Methods and Software”, written by Wesley Owens and Appendix 2, "Select bibliography of published works with relevance to an archaeological study of the Munster Plantation", by James Lyttleton. Copyright for the iBook belongs to Thomas Herron and East Carolina University.

Against recent criticism by Bruce Danner, this article defends a previous identification of the Fox in MHT as figuring (primarily) Adam Loftus, Archbishop of Dublin and Lord Chancellor of Ireland, and not only (secondarily) Lord Burleigh. It does so by emphasizing Burleigh’s ties to Ireland, including those mysteriously figured in the Bregog digression of Colin Clouts Come Home Againe. It provides further context for beast fables involving English-Irish ecclesiastical politics, including a new (possible) identification of Loftus in Nicholas Baxter’s The Countess of Pembroke’s Ourania that directly echoes Spenser’s MHT.

... I would like to thank Valerie McGowan-Doyle for her help in editing a subsequent draft and David Scott Wilson-Okamura for his encouragement; any mistakes are of course my own. ... 3. See Hiram Morgan's introduction, "Beyond Spenser? A ...

SPENSER STUDIES IS aging well. Never dormant, this distinguished sibling of Chaucer, Sidney, Milton, and Shakespeare studies has recently rejuvenated itself on a world stage while keeping a distinguished profile. We have come to radically reassess what the poet wrote and why: his techniques are more new, his purposes more old than we had thought. Spenser texts are available to more readers than ever before, thanks to new editorial projects and digitization. The many threads of the Spenser tapestry are beginning to make sense when viewed together, despite their contradictions and loose ends. Spenser was the Virgil, or prince of poets, of his time, and his time was golden: the glory period of late Elizabethan literature. He was a genius and prolific. He was and is hugely influential, while also deeply controversial (regarding his role as an Irish colonist in particular). No Spenser, no Shakespeare, Marlowe, or Milton, at least as we know them; indeed, no Yeats or Heaney. His life was a fascinating and deeply complicated one, and his works are profound and yet puzzling. Many basic questions remain unanswered: biographically speaking, where was he in the 1580s, and under what circumstances did he die? Did he co-write works? Why did he write his epic, and to what extent is it a fragment and/or anti-imperial, a deliberate ruin of a work? Scholars have ably responded to the challenge on many fronts, including the interdisciplinary and international, while not neglecting Spenser at home, wherever that may be. This review mainly covers developments in Spenser biography, editions, and monographs, as well as online resources, over a five-year period (2009–13). In addition to remaining au courant with popular trends, recent studies of Spenser have been remarkable for their innovative exploitation of traditional methods of scholarship. These include publication and editing history, biographical-cultural historicization, and formalist studies. All of these fields are fundamental to revising our understanding of the poet’s life and work, including the very manner in which his poetry should be read.

ABSTRACT This paper examines the co-authored revenge tragedy Titus Andronicus (pub. 1594) as a subtly constructed space (as we read it on the page) that emphasizes its hellish torments and moral message through an oblique use of a graduated elemental scheme within it. The four elements are loosely clustered according to the act divisions of the play established in the First Folio. The play incorporates the elements according to a Virgilian–Aristotelian scheme, progressing naturally from earth to fire, and so demonstrates an intertwined dual framework of renaissance natural philosophy and religion reminiscent of classical and medieval purgatorial and hellish concepts. The elements thereby form a running and varying structural conceit that reinforces the “hellish” experience that an audience (or reader) might expect from a revenge tragedy, including George Peele’s Battle of Alcazar. When understood in this way, we see how the elemental scheme undergirding the play provides a structural moral and intellectual coherence relevant to all of us. The individual characters undergo horrendous torments and remarkable changes; they are, in a sense, writhing souls in communal suffering bound by the cosmic borders of the stage, which was commonly understood conceptually as a microcosm. The underlying elemental scheme reinforces the concept of the play as a virtual or parodic hell and/or purgatory: a play that begins amid earthly desires and burials ends with the destructive bonfires of the living hell that the characters thrust (and bake) themselves into.

FAyre Thamis streame, that from Ludds stately towne, Runst paying tribute to the Ocean seas, Let all thy Nymphs and Syrens of renowne Be silent, whyle this Bryttane Orpheus playes. --Commendatory Verse to The Faerie Queene by R. S. In a short article on big topics, Donna Hamilton argues that the political agendas of successive sixteenth-century translations of Virgil's Aeneid, by Gavin Douglas, Henry Howard (earl of Surrey), Thomas Phaer, and Richard Stanyhurst, had differing, predominantly Catholic and counterreformation but also Protestant ideological agendas that reflected the beliefs of the authors or those who patronized the works; the first translations, for example, were published during the Marian reign, which made the westward expansion of Rome highly topical (D. Hamilton). To judge from the Dedicatory Sonnets of The Faerie Queene, and especially their direct allusions to Virgil and his patrons Maecenas and Augustus (Hatton 8; Walsingham), as well as their plentiful praise of epic or martial poetry (Hatton 7; Northumberland 1-4; Cumberland 6; Essex 12; Howard 4-5; Hunsdon 13; Buckhurst 7-8; Norris 4; Ralegh 11), we are invited to read Edmund Spenser's Virgil-influenced epic in a similar light: as both imperial spur and consolation to Protestant warriors who sought to expand Tudor political influence under their own religious banner. (1) I will underscore this reading by pointing to ways in which the innovative Dedicatory Sonnets focus our attention on Irish soil in ways as yet unnoticed by critics. The Sonnets celebrate and chastise Spenser's fellow planters and patrons while promising fertile opportunity to anyone who might be tempted to venture west and north across St. George's Channel. They therefore call for continued military severity in the name of English heroic and imperial ideals and, of course, self-interest, a pro-martial law stance taken most clearly by Spenser's policy tract, A View of the Present State of Ireland (Edwards, "Ideology"). Spenser often emphasizes key concepts through repetition of words in and between poems, as with the word place (Hunsdon 6, 8; Buckhurst 2, 5; Walsingham 5; Ralegh 2). Both Carol Stillman and David Lee Miller argue that Spenser orders the Sonnets so as to "place" his patrons, whose "honor" and "nobility" he idealizes as members of the court. The Sonnets are ordered by importance of family and office, suggesting that Spenser condones and celebrates not only the dedicatees but also the rigid hierarchies of Tudor rule (Stillman 143-48; D. Miller, Two Bodies 49-62). William tram, picking up this thread, argues that Spenser not only gives "place" of merit to his dedicatees, but simultaneously asserts with "exuberant aggressiveness" his own arrival at court as a poet of a great, even transcendent, work of national importance. Newly arrived back in London in the fall of 1589 after ten years living, writing, and administering in Ireland (where his own place shifted steadily to the south-west, from Dublin to Kildare to his house and home in north County Cork), Spenser calls attention to his ability to shape (and even subtly criticize) his patrons through his art. These patrons are so honorable and noble in part because he makes them so (Oram, "Seventeen"). Spenser, as we will see, "places" his virtuous patrons in a geographical context of world and Irish politics, and not only on abstract ladders of courtly hierarchy centered on London alone. The Sonnets and the epic highlight the "place" in his poetry and the world that Spenser has found or wishes to find for both these patrons and himself. I Arms and the Empire The Sonnets are placed with the Commendatory Verses and the Letter to Ralegh at the end of the 1590 edition. The back matter disappears with the 1596 edition. Why it appears at the end of the first three books and only there remains a mystery, although Wayne Erickson (following the work of Mark Bland) argues that Spenser intended its placement there and that the net effect of this move is to gloriously isolate both the title page and the elaborate dedication to the queen at the beginning of the poem, on A1 recto and verso, respectively (Erickson, "Front and Back"). …

Review(s) of: The Natural History of Ireland Included in Book One of the Zoilomastix of Don Philip O'Sullivan Beare, by Philip O'Sullivan Beare, Translated and Edited by Denis C. O'Sullivan with a Foreword by Keith Sidwell, Cork: Cork University Press, 2009, 296 pp. RRP 39.00 ISBN 9781859184394.

... 14 Famously, an Italian and Spanish papal expeditionary force had landed at Smerwick Harbor, County Kerry in 1580 in order to ... Furthermore, as Christopher Highley has noted, Richard Bingham's nickname was "the Flail of Connaught," thanks to his bloodthirsty reputation in ...

The Origins of Sectarianism in Early Modern Ireland. Edited by Alan Ford and John McCafferty. (New York: Cambridge University Press. 2005. Pp. x, 249. $90.00.) This volume (the product of a University CoEege Dublin symposium organized by Ford and McCafferty and held against the backdrop of those fateful days in Belfast, AprU 1998) ostensibly explores the early modern period for roots of sectarian hatred in modern Ireland. It contains a balanced mix of approaches (political, religious, social, literary, and inteUectual), but surprisingly concentrates less on violence and struggle than perceptions of "otherness." In many ways, it documents the symbiosis, co-existence, and downright inextricabUity that developed between the invented traditions of Catholic and Protestant communities in post-Reformation Ireland. In stUl others, it nuances subtle sectarian atavisms that persist in Anglo-Irish historiography of the earlymodern period - albeit with the laudable goal of proving which side was more ecumenical. Ford's introduction begins with powerful analogies of religious violence in modern and early modern Ireland serving to trace sectarianism back to a time "when Protestants and Catholics began to Eve apart and create paraUel communities, institutions, cultures and histories" (p. 3). What foUows is a useful overview of themes broken down structuraUy into sections on periodization, terminology, struggle and coexistence, the sacraments, and education respectively. Suspicious of the simplistic interpretation of constant struggle in Ireland since the Act of Supremacy down to the restoration of power-sharing, Ford points to a real rise in tensions after 1580. Here he aEudes to recent attempts to situate the origins of religious strUe in Ireland outside the northern archipelago and within the wider European process of confessionalization.The aUusion is, of course, to the lead article by Ute Lotz-Heumann, whose book on confessionalization in Ireland dramaticaEy changed the dimensions of the pitch. Here, for the first time in EngEsh, she sums up her comparative arguments on the periodization of the Reformation/Counter-Reformation in Ireland as part of a broader European social phenomenon. McCafferty foUows with a narrative prosopography of the Church of Ireland episcopate under the early Stuarts. He reveals how limitations, such as poverty, faUed reorganization, and royal neglect relegated the Irish bishops to the "B"league. Faced with lay apathy, most found themselves struggEng to cope in fairly dismal conditions. Alternately, Tadhg O hAnnrachain examines a Catholic episcopate which, though accepting Trent, remained politicaUy divided over loyalty to the Stuarts and wiUing to compromise with royal Protestantism in the struggle against Puritanism. …