Living on an island at the 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 geography can shape a people. This book is the first full-length study of medieval Irish topographical writing. It situates the theories and poetics of Irish place - developed over six centuries in response to a variety of political, cultural, religious and economic changes - in the bigger theoretical picture of studies of space, landscape, environmental writing and postcolonial identity construction. Presenting focused studies of important literary texts by authors from Ireland and Britain, it shows how these discourses influenced European conceptions of place and identity, as well as understandings of how to write the world.
Autorentext
Amy C. Mulligan is Assistant Professor of Irish Language and Literature at the University of Notre Dame
Klappentext
In recent decades, spatiality the consideration of what it means to be situated in space and place has become a key concept in understanding human behavior and cultural production. Texts by and about the medieval Irish contain perhaps the highest concentration of spatial writing in the medieval European milieu, and only in Ireland was a distinct genre of placelore formalized.As this book shows, Ireland provides an extensively documented example of a culture that took a pre-modern 'spatial turn' and developed influential textual models through which audiences, religious and secular, in Ireland and in Europe, could engage with landscapes near and far. The country's peripheral geographic position, widespread monastic practices of self-imposed exile and nomadism, and early experiences of English colonialism required strategies for maintaining a place-based identity while undergoing dispossession from ancestral lands. These cultural developments, combined with the early establishment of Latin and vernacular literary institutions, primed the Irish to create and implement this poetics of place.A landscape of words traces the trajectory of Irish place-writing through close study of the 'greatest hits' of (and about) medieval Ireland: Adomnán's De locis sanctis, Navigatio Sancti Brendani, vernacular voyage tales, Táin Bó Cualnge, Acallam na Senórach, the Topographia and Expugnatio Hibernica of Gerald of Wales, and Anglo-Latin accounts of St. Patrick's Purgatory. It provides rigorous source analysis in support of new ways of understanding medieval Irish literature, landscape and place-writing that will be essential reading for scholars of medieval Ireland and Britain.
Inhalt
Introduction 1 Holy islands: transformative landscapes and the origins of an Irish spatial poetics 2 Place-making heroes and the storying of Ireland's vernacular landscape 3 A versified Ireland: the Dindshenchas Érenn and a national poetics of space 4 National pilgrims: travelling a sanctified landscape with Saint Patrick 5 English topographies of Ireland's conquest and conversion ConclusionIndex