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

Palmer explores the part that language played in shaping colonial ideology and English national identity.

Patricia Palmer (Author)

9780521793186, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 20 September 2001

268 pages
23.6 x 16 x 2 cm, 0.57 kg

Review of the hardback: '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

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 that 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.

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.

Subject Areas: Early modern history: c 1450/1500 to c 1700 [HBLH], European history [HBJD], Literary studies: c 1500 to c 1800 [DSBD], Historical & comparative linguistics [CFF]