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“An headlesse Ladie” and “a horsesloade of heades”: Writing the Beheading

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Palmer Patricia
Palmer Patricia*
Affiliation:
University of York
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Abstract

The savagery of the native Irish and, in particular, their predilection for severing heads, is repeatedly asserted, not only in the texts of conquest, but in representations of the “Wild Irish” on the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage. This essay tests this literary commonplace against the historical record of the early modern conquest of Ireland. Far from being merely the aberrant practice of the barbarous Gaels, beheading — and a form of judicial headhunting — became a cornerstone of the conquerors’ policy of martial law. As atrocity was redefined as justice, so, in the hands of writers such as Spenser, Churchyard, and Derricke, was it aestheticized. But even as such writers wove inventive beheadings into their texts, Irish poets were elegizing the severed heads of patrons killed by the English. The poetry of beheading became a site of cultural confrontation and of unexpected assertions of humanity.

Type
Research Article
Information
Renaissance Quarterly , Volume 60 , Issue 1 , Spring 2007 , pp. 25 - 57
Copyright
Copyright © 2007 Renaissance Society of America

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References

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McGurk, John. The Elizabethan Conquest of Ireland: The 1590s Crisis. Manchester, 1997.Google Scholar
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The Battle of Kinsale. Ed. Hiram Morgan. Bray, 2004.Google Scholar
Bednarz, James P. “Ralegh in Spenser’s Historical Allegory.” Spenser Studies 5 (1983) : 49–70.Google Scholar
Bigger, Francis Joseph. Sir Arthur Chichester. Belfast, 1904.Google Scholar
Bourke, Joanna. An Intimate History of Killing: Face-to-Face Killing in Twentieth-Century Warfare. London, 1999.Google Scholar
Bradshaw, Brendan. “Nationalism and Historical Scholarship in Modern Ireland.” Irish Historical Studies 26 (1989) : 329–51.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Breatnach, Caoimhín. “The Early Modern Version of Scéla Mucce Meic Da Thó: Tempus, Locus, Persona et Causa Scribendi.” Ériu 41 (1990) : 37–60.Google Scholar
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Calendar of the Carew Manuscripts 1589–1600. Ed. J. S. Brewer and William Bullen. London, 1867–71.Google Scholar
Calendar of State Papers, Ireland [hereafter CSPI] 1574–1585. Ed. E. G. Atkinson. London, 1893.Google Scholar
CSPI 1592–1596. Google Scholar
CSPI 1596–1597. Google Scholar
CSPI 1598–1599. Google Scholar
CSPI 1599–1600. Google Scholar
CSPI 1600–1601. Google Scholar
CSPI 1601–1603. Google Scholar
Cameron, Alexander. Reliquiae Celticae. Ed. Alexander Macbain and John Kennedy. 2 vols. Inverness, 1892–94.Google Scholar
Canny, Nicholas. Making Ireland British 1580–1650. Oxford, 2001.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Carey, Vincent. “John Derricke’s Image of Ireland, Sir Henry Sidney, and the Massacre at Mullaghmast, 1578.” Irish Historical Studies 31 (1999) : 305–27.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Carey, Vincent. “What pen can paint or tears atone?’: Mountjoy’s Scorched Earth Campaign.” In The Battle of Kinsale (2004), 205–16.Google Scholar
Challoner, Richard. Memoirs of Missionary Priests. Ed. Pollen, J. H.. London, 1924.Google Scholar
Churchyard, Thomas. A Generall Rehearsall of Warres. London, 1579.Google Scholar
Cunningham, Bernadette, and Ray Gillespie. “The East-Ulster Bardic Family of Ó Gnímh.” Éigse 20 (1984) : 106–14.Google Scholar
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Dent, R. W. John Webster’s Borrowing. Berkeley, 1950.Google Scholar
Derricke, John. The Image of Irelande. Ed. J. Small. 1581. Edinburgh, 1883.Google Scholar
Díaz, Bernal. The Conquest of New Spain. Trans. J. M. Cohen. New York, 1963.Google Scholar
Docwra, Henry. “A Narration of the Services done by the Army ymployed to Lough Foyle.” In Miscellany of the Celtic Society, ed. O’Donovan, John, 1849.Google Scholar
Donagan, Barbara. “Atrocity, War Crime, and Treason in the English Civil War.” American Historical Review 99 (1994) : 1137–66.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dwyer Amussen, Susan. “Punishment, Discipline and Power: The Social Meaning of Violence in Early Modern England.” Journal of British Studies 34 (1995) : 1–34.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Edwards, David. “Beyond Reform: Martial Law and the Tudor Reconquest of Ireland.” History Ireland 5, no. 2 (1997) : 16–21.Google Scholar
Edwards, David. “In Tyrone’s Shadow: Feagh Mc Hugh, Forgotten Leader of the Nine Years War.” In Feagh Mc Hugh O’Byrne (1998), 214–48.Google Scholar
Edwards, David. The Ormond Lordship in County Kilkenny, 1515–1642. Dublin, 2003.Google Scholar
Edwards, David. “Legacy of Defeat: The Reduction of Gaelic Ireland after Kinsale.” In The Battle of Kinsale (2004), 279–99.Google Scholar
Edwards, David. “The Escalation of Violence in Sixteenth-Century Ireland.” In Age of Atrocity: Violent Death and Political Conflict in Early Modern Ireland, ed. David Edwards, Padraig Lenihan, and Clodagh Tait, ed. Dublin, forthcoming.Google Scholar
Feagh Mc Hugh O’Byrne: The Wicklow Firebrand. Ed. Conor O’Brien. Journal of the Rathdrum Historical Society 1 (1998): 1–280.Google Scholar
Gainsford, Thomas. The Glory of England. London, 1618.Google Scholar
John, Harington. Nugae Antiquae. Ed. T. Park. 2 vols. London, 1804.Google Scholar
Henley, Pauline. Spenser in Ireland. Cork, 1928.Google Scholar
Highley, Christopher. Shakespeare, Spenser, and the Crisis in Ireland. Cambridge, 1997.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
The History of Sir John Perrott. Ed. Rawlingson, Richard. London, 1728.Google Scholar
Hooker, John. “The Irish Historie composed and written by Giraldus Cambrensis, and Translated into English … together with the Supplie of the said Historie … vnto 1587.” In Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland, ed. Raphael Holinshed, 6:99–232; 275–461. London, 1807–08.Google Scholar
The Irish Sections of Fynes Moryson’s Unpublished Itinerary. Ed. Kew, Graham. Dublin, 1998.Google Scholar
Jackson, Kenneth H.. The Oldest Irish Tradition. 1964. Reprint, Felinfach, 1999.Google Scholar
Jacobs, Nicholas. “Fled Bricrenn and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.” In Fled Bricrenn: Reassessments, ed. Pádraig Ó Riain, 40–55. London, 2000.Google Scholar
Janes, Regina. Losing our Heads: Beheadings in Literature and Culture. New York, 2005.Google Scholar
Jenkins, Raymond. “Spenser and Ireland.” English Literary History 19 (1952): 131–42.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jones, Ann Rosalind. “Italians and Others.” In Staging the Renaissance, ed. David Scott Kastan and Peter Stallybrass, 251–62. New York, 1991.Google Scholar
Keating, Geoffrey [Seathrún Céitinn]. Foras Feasa ar Éirinn. Trans. Patrick Dinneen. 4 vols. London, 1902–14.Google Scholar
Kinsella, Thomas, trans. The Táin. Oxford, 2002.Google Scholar
Laqueur, Thomas W.. “Crowds, Carnival and the State in English Executions, 1604–1868.” In The First Modern Society, ed. A. L. Beier, David Cannadine, and James M. Rosenheim, 305–55. Cambridge, 1989.Google Scholar
Mac Airt, Seán, ed. Leabhar Branach: The Book of the O’Byrnes. Dublin, 1944.Google Scholar
Mac Cana, Proinsias. Celtic Mythology. 1968. Reprint, Feltham, 1983.Google Scholar
MacCarthy, B. G. “The Riddle of Rose O’Toole.” In Féilscribinn Torna, ed. Seán Pender, 171–82. Cork, 1947.Google Scholar
Magoun, F. P. History of Football from the Beginnings to 1871. Bochum, 1938.Google Scholar
Marstrander, Carl. “A New Version of the Battle of Mag Rath.” Ériu 5 (1911) : 226–47.Google Scholar
McGurk, John. The Elizabethan Conquest of Ireland: The 1590s Crisis. Manchester, 1997.Google Scholar
Merback, Mitchell. The Thief, the Cross and the Wheel: Pain and the Spectacle of Punishment in Medieval and Renaissance Europe. London, 1999.Google Scholar
Morgan, Hiram. “The End of Gaelic Ulster: A Thematic Interpretation of Events between 1534 and 1610.” Irish Historical Studies 26 (1989) : 8–32.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Morgan, Hiram. “Perrot’s Poison Plot.” In Feagh Mc Hugh O’Byrne (1998), 182–96.Google Scholar
Ó Donnabháin, Barra. “Monuments of Shame: Some Probable Trophy Heads from Mediaeval Dublin.” Archaeology Ireland 9, no. 4 (1995) : 12–15.Google Scholar
Ó hUiginn, Tadhg Dall. “A dhá cheanna ós mo chionn.” In The Book of O’Hara, ed. Lambert McKenna, 290–99. Dublin, 1951.Google Scholar
O Rahilly, Alfred. The Massacre at Smer-wick. Cork, 1938.Google Scholar
The Ouer-throw of an Irish rebell, in a late battaile. London, 1608.Google Scholar
Palmer, Patricia. Language and Conquest in Early Modern Ireland: English Renaissance Literature and Elizabethan Imperial Expansion. Cambridge, 2001.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Palmer, Patricia. “Missing Bodies, Absent Bards: Spenser, Shakespeare and a Crisis in Criticism.” English Literary Renaissance 36, no. 3 (2006) : 374–93.Google Scholar
Palmer, Patricia. “At the Sign of the Head: The Currency of beheading in Early Modern Ireland.” In Cultures of Violence: Interpersonal Violence in Historical Perspective, ed. Stuart Carroll. London, forthcoming.Google Scholar
Perrott, James. The Chronicle of Ireland, 1584–1608. Ed. Herbert Wood. Dublin, 1933.Google Scholar
Quint, David. Epic and Empire: Politics and Generic Form from Virgil to Milton. Princeton, 1993.Google Scholar
Ralegh, Walter. Report of the Truth of the Fight about the Iles of Azores. London, 1595.Google Scholar
Redshaw, Thomas Dillon. “Patrimony: On the Tête Coupée in John Montague’s The Rough Field.” In Language and Tradition in Ireland: Continuities and Displacements, ed. Maria Tymoczko and Colin Ireland, 172–94. Amherst, 2003.Google Scholar
Riche, Barnabe. Catholicke Conference. London, 1612.Google Scholar
Ross, Anne. The Pagan Celts. Ruthin, 1998.Google Scholar
Rowe, Katherine. Dead Hands: Fictions of Agency, Renaissance to Modern. Stanford, 1999.Google Scholar
Ruff, Julius R.. Violence in Early Modern Europe 1500–1800. Cambridge, 2001.Google Scholar
Shakespeare, William. Henry V. Ed. Gary Taylor. Oxford, 1998.Google Scholar
Shapiro, James. 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare. London, 2005.Google Scholar
Sheehan, Anthony J. “The Killing of the Earl of Desmond, November 1583.” Journal of the Cork Historical and Archaeological Society 88. 247 (1983) : 106–10.Google Scholar
Spenser, Edmund. The Works of Edmund Spenser. Ed. Edwin Greenlaw et al. 11 vols. Baltimore, 1932–49.Google Scholar
Spenser, Edmund. The Faerie Queene. Ed. Thomas P. Roche, Jr., and C. Patrick O’Donnell, Jr. New York, 1987.Google Scholar
Spenser, Edmund. A View of the Present State of Ireland. Ed. Andrew Hadfield and Willy Maley. Oxford, 1997.Google Scholar
Stahl, Paul-Henri. Histoire de la decapitation. Paris, 1986.Google Scholar
Stokes, Whitney. “The Battle of Allen.” Revue Celtique 24 (1903) : 41–70..Google Scholar
Synge, John M. Collected Plays. Harmondsworth, 1952.Google Scholar
Tricomi, Albert H. “The Severed Hand in Webster’s Duchess of Malfi.” Studies in English Literature 44 (2004) : 347–58.Google Scholar
Uí Chlérigh, Lughaidh. Beatha Aodha Ruaidh Uí Dhomhnaill. Part 1. Ed. and trans. Paul Walsh. Dublin, 1948.Google Scholar
A Viceroy’s Vindication? Sir Henry Sidney’s Memoir of Service in Ireland 1556–78. Ed. Brady, Ciaran. Cork, 2002.Google Scholar
Webster, John. The White Devil. Ed. Elizabeth M. Brennan. London, 1966.Google Scholar
Webster, John. The Works of John Webster. Ed. David Gunby. 2 vols. Cambridge, 1995.Google Scholar
Webster, John. The White Devil. Ed. Christina Luckyj. 2nd ed., London, 1996.Google Scholar
“William Farmer’s Chronicles of Ireland.” Ed. C. Litton Falkiner, English Historical Review 22, no. 85 (1907): 104–30, 527–52.Google Scholar
Woollett, Anne T., and van, Ariane Suchtelen, , eds. Rubens and Brueghel: A Working Friendship. Los Angeles, 2006.Google Scholar