The Irish vernacular tradition is among the oldest in Europe, but the role of women in this tradition has long been obscured. The public role of the poet in medieval Ireland was considerable, but the poet was invariably male. For evidence of women poets, we must turn to the oral tradition, the ranks of the baird rather than the more elevated filid, and women connected with religious communities, such as St Samthann, abbess of Clonbroney (fl. 730s). Questions of attribution are often tangled, with words attributed to eminent historical personalities, such as Derbforgaill queen of Bréifne (†1193), regardless of the authorship of the text. Further celebrated instances of this include the poems of Liadan and Cuirithir, Queen Gormlaith, and the ‘Hag of Beare’ (an Caillech Béirre). This last work, most likely the work of a ninth-century nun named Digde, is a meditation on age and mortality in the light of the Christian promise of eternity. Despite the penumbra in which they wrote, Irish women of the medieval period left a powerful and enduring poetic legacy.

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.

Although a major Irish-language poet, Biddy Jenkinson is perhaps best known for forbidding the translation of her work into English, calling her decision ‘a small rude gesture to those who think that everything can be harvested and stored without loss in an English-speaking Ireland’. Yet the picture that emerges from her work is anything but that of a Gaelic puritan. Jenkinson’s world is not one of loss and lamentation for a vanished past, but of vibrant immersion in mythopoeia of sex, myth, and monstrosity. In her work on County Wicklow, where she has long been resident, she excavates colonial history, exploring the points of connection between the colonial Pale and its wild Gaelic Other. In her work on the cannibal hag figure Mis, she vividly recuperates feminine monstrosity as a poetic force to be reckoned with. The linguistic energy of Jenkinson’s work combined with the obscurity it inhabits, as difficult and scholarly work (though often very funny too), makes her an exemplary representative of the submerged Gaelic bardic tradition.