Chapter 3 - Recollecting women from early modern Ireland, Scotland and Wales

Summary

The Renaissance arts of memory understood recollection ‘as an act of composition, a gathering-up into a place’. This chapter is a gesture towards the recomposition of the scattered fragments of early modern women's textual cultures in the Celtic regions. The pioneering archival work of scholars including Marie-Louise Coolahan, Naomi McAreavey, Elizabeth Taylor and Ruth Connolly on Ireland; Ceridwen Lloyd-Morgan, Nia Powell and Cathryn Charnell-White on Wales; and Sarah Dunnigan, Anne Frater and Suzanne Trill on Scotland has greatly enriched our knowledge of the corpus of texts left by women in those countries. But it is clear that there is more still to be done to recover and analyze this immensely rich but critically neglected body of work. Bringing together materials from oral cultures, manuscripts composed both for personal purposes and for circulation, and published works, this chapter sketches an initial map of the terrain. It contextualises and introduces some works by women living in and moving through early modern Ireland, Scotland and Wales which speak powerfully of the distinctive cultural work memory was required to do in those countries at a time of change. In these often neglected texts, the interplay of recollection and location made sites of memory out of the poetic compositions and personal writings of early modern women in the Celtic countries. Attending to them extends and enriches our understanding of the cultural geographies of women's writing of history and memory in the early modern period.