Chapter 2 - Seventeenth-Century Women’s Poetry in Ireland

Summary

This essay surveys the small but compelling body of poetry written by women in Ireland, in English and Irish, in the seventeenth century. The Irish bardic tradition generally excluded women, but exceptions do occur, as when a bardic poem addressed to the teenaged Brighid Nic Gearailt elicits a response from its subject. The bardic poems of Caitlín Dubh are another exception again, memorialising an Irish-speaking Protestant loyalist, the Earl of Thomond. Women did, however, occupy a central role in the caoine/caoineadh traditions (the rituals of verse and oral lament). In the Anglophone tradition, poets such as Mary Sidney Herbert, Anne Southwell, and Katherine Philips explore their marginality from their positions as colonial Protestant writers, while still engaging sympathetically with Ireland as setting and subject matter. The network of connections between writers and readers is often complex, but the picture that emerges comprehensively deepens our understanding of Irish poetry from this period.