Dublin: Renaissance city of literature

By Theresa O'Byrne, Raymond Gillespie, Andrew Hadfield and 8 more

Dublin: Renaissance city of literature interrogates the notion of a literary 'renaissance' in Dublin. Through detailed case studies of print and literature in Renaissance Dublin, the volume covers innovative new ground, including quantitative analysis of print production in Ireland, unique insight into the city's literary communities and considerations of literary genres that flourished in early modern Dublin. The volume's broad focus and extended timeline offer an unprecedented and comprehensive consideration of the features of renaissance that may be traced to the city from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century. With contributions from leading scholars in the area of early modern Ireland, including Raymond Gillespie and Andrew Hadfield, students and academics will find the book an invaluable resource for fully appreciating those elements that contributed to the complex literary character of Dublin as a Renaissance city of literature.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Jun 30, 2017
• ISBN: 9781526113269

Book preview

Introduction

Kathleen Miller

From its Nobel laureates to its literary festivals, modern-day Dublin lives up to its role as a literary capital. But Dublin’s firmly established literary identity raises questions for scholars engaged in the study of another Dublin – that of the medieval and early modern periods. When, in 2010, Dublin was designated a UNESCO City of Literature, a groundbreaking symposium was organised to address the question of whether Dublin was a city of literature during the Renaissance. In September 2012, scholars met, fittingly, in one of the city’s oldest literary venues, Marsh’s Library, for a conference entitled ‘Dublin: Renaissance City of Literature?’ Contributors travelled from universities in the USA, England and across Ireland, representing disciplines including classics, literature and history, to debate the character of the literary culture of early modern Dublin. This volume emerges from that event.

The question of whether Ireland experienced a cultural and literary Renaissance has received increasing scholarly attention in recent years, and this volume extends the discussion by engaging with the specific literary culture of its capital city. The chapters in this volume gather together established and emerging literary critics and historians to interrogate the notion of a literary ‘Renaissance’ in Dublin. This volume adds clarity to the existing scholarly discussion by adopting two new approaches. Firstly, while many existing studies approach the question of an Irish Renaissance within early modernity, this volume extends the period under investigation by beginning its discussion in the early fifteenth century, tracing the emergence of Dublin’s Renaissance literary identity in the late medieval period. Secondly, this volume addresses a wider range of topics and themes than much of the existing scholarly literature, and includes reflections on the emergence and evolution of print culture, the impact of English and European influences, the construction and negotiation of Dublin literary identities, the habits of reading in early modern Dublin, contributions from non-anglophone contexts and the impact of Anglo-Irish political relations. This broader focus creates a more cohesive understanding of the features of the Renaissance that appeared in Ireland than might at first have been anticipated. Within the following chapters, language, ethnicity, religion, as well as political and cultural identity emerge as dependent upon one another. Dublin: Renaissance city of literature provides a new map of this literary culture, in which people, places and discourses appear and reappear with surprising frequency. This volume suggests that our fragmented view of the Renaissance in Ireland, which has been lamented in previous scholarly work, may finally be dissipating, as scholars pay increasing attention to how a rebirth of literary activity might actually have appeared.¹ The intellectual elements we associate with ‘Renaissance’ in Europe existed and evolved throughout late medieval and early modern Ireland; this volume illuminates their contribution to the literary cultures of Dublin.

Existing contexts and current views

Recent scholarship has demonstrated the growing interest in identifying an Irish Renaissance, even as it has called attention to the difficulties of doing so. This work has been developed as our understanding of early modern Ireland has improved. In recent years, scholars have made a number of innovative contributions to the historiography. Some of this work has contributed to an increasing appreciation of the cityscape of early modern Dublin. Colm Lennon and Howard B. Clarke provide accounts of thousands of sites, as well as numerous maps, aerial views and reconstructions of medieval and early modern Dublin, as part of the Irish historic towns atlas project.² Corresponding with this extensive project is Lennon’s ‘From Speed to Rocque: The development of early modern Dublin’, which describes the transition of Dublin from that depicted in John Speed’s work of cartography in 1610 to that depicted by John Rocque in 1756, and the corresponding transformation of the ‘medieval fabric’ of the city into the expansive metropolis of the eighteenth century.³ Further clarifying our understanding of Ireland’s landscape in the past is work by the Irish Post-Medieval Archaeology Group, which shares essential information on archaeological excavations in Ireland and literature relating to post-medieval archaeology, also publishing volumes that correspond with the Group’s conference proceedings.⁴ Never before have scholars had such a lively and complete impression of how early modern Ireland may have looked.

Cultural and literary historians are increasingly considering the culturally contingent and linguistically polyvalent character of early modern Irish life, and are moving away from paradigms that draw on the well-known religious and cultural disjunctions of the period.⁵ Alan Ford’s ‘Apocalyptic Ireland: 1580–1641’ (2013), for example, improves our understanding of the connection between religion and violence in early modern Ireland. Ford addresses the link between ‘presentist’ apocalyptic interpretations of events in early modern Ireland between 1579 and 1641 by Protestants and the justification of violence toward Catholics.⁶ The same scholar’s contributions to the volumes Constructing the past: Writing Irish history, 1600–1800 (2010)⁷ and Reshaping Ireland, 1550–1700 (2011)⁸ engage with questions of how the writing of history has shaped popular perceptions of the past. In each volume, Ford considers, in part, James Ussher’s shifting reputation after his death in 1656, as Ussher’s views and writings were revisited and re-imagined with considerable interpretive leeway over the next four decades. In tandem with a growing understanding of how religion was interpreted and applied is work on the contexts and cultures influencing the political landscape of early modern Ireland. Mark Hutchinson’s study of the emergence of a modern understanding of state in Ireland, ahead of Britain and Europe, describes the Irish government acting autonomously due to its physical distance from Queen Elizabeth and cultural distance from the polity, and the corresponding shift in usage of the term ‘state’, which went from referring to Ireland’s condition to describing the ‘authority possessed by the lord deputy and council in Ireland’.⁹ Simultaneously, literary critics have continued to recontextualise well-known authors, such as Edmund Spenser, to generate more historically nuanced readings of canonical texts. Anthologies such as Andrew Carpenter’s groundbreaking Verse in English from Tudor and Stuart Ireland (2003)¹⁰ and larger editorial projects such as the Four Courts ‘Early Irish Fiction’ series and Elizabethanne Boran’s The correspondence of James Ussher, 1600–1656 (2015)¹¹ have recovered important texts from early modern Ireland. By unpacking Ireland’s history – religious, cultural and literary – the unique pressures and contexts that shaped perceptions in early modern Ireland are being viewed with unprecedented clarity.

Three texts, in particular, have provided valuable insight into the literary cultures of early modern Ireland: The Oxford history of the Irish book (2006), volume three, edited by two of the contributors to this volume, Raymond Gillespie and Andrew Hadfield, and two volumes edited by Michael Potterton and Thomas Herron, Ireland in the Renaissance, c.1540–1660 (2007) and Dublin and the Pale in the Renaissance, c.1540–1660 (2011). In the latter texts, the study of the Renaissance in Ireland is accompanied by frequent caveats, such as Herron’s claim that this cultural movement was necessarily ‘fragmented’.¹² Reviewers of Ireland in the Renaissance repeatedly noted the challenges faced by scholars locating this subject, which requires a ‘slight effort of focus’.¹³ While noting the discomfort and misgivings that seem to accompany this search for a subject, these volumes establish key aspects of its contexts through historical, architectural, musical and literary studies. Yet some of the conclusions seem paradoxical. Potterton explains that Dublin and the Pale in the Renaissance and Ireland in the Renaissance do not ‘suggest that the Renaissance played a very major role in Ireland, or vice versa’.¹⁴ Instead, these collections seek to examine the changes seen in Ireland in the early modern period within the context of the broader Renaissance. Of greatest consequence to this volume are the sections in these earlier studies on textuality and literature. In the ‘Music, language & letters’ section of Dublin and the Pale in the Renaissance, Eva Griffith offers a lively examination of the process behind establishing the Werburgh Street playhouse and its connection to James Shirley.¹⁵ In the same collection, Herron describes the allegorical value of Richard Stanihurst’s partial translation of Virgil’s Aeneid, which becomes a ‘window into the cultural struggles surrounding its author’.¹⁶ Brendan Kane discusses the political implications of language choice in early modern Ireland, as he establishes that the Irish language was of greater influence in Jacobean Ireland than is typically acknowledged.¹⁷ Kane describes the language’s ‘symbolic importance’ in establishing and maintaining status, providing an account of the fourth earl of Thomond, Donough O’Brien, and his connection to the Contention of the bards, a debate between poets that circulated in manuscript in the early seventeenth century and addressed the competing ‘merits’ of northern and southern Ireland.¹⁸ In Ireland in the Renaissance, Willy Maley critically examines the rhetoric, inclusions and exclusions of Sir Henry Sidney’s Memoir (1583), considering how what is remembered and forgotten is central to the ‘colonial discourse of the New English colonists’.¹⁹ A later chapter by Valerie McGowan-Doyle returns to Sidney in its analysis of the influence of John Lydgate’s Fall of princes on the Old English Book of Howth, which provides a scathing critique of Sidney’s reforms in Ireland.²⁰ The interdisciplinary approach featured in these studies, in which literary works are analysed alongside architecture and archaeology, leaves room for the sustained study of the literary culture of Dublin provided by this volume. Dublin: Renaissance city of literature constructs an image of what an Irish Renaissance might have looked like through studies of literature, language, translation and theatre-going in the capital city. This volume is also indebted to the meticulous scholarship collected in The Oxford history of the Irish book, which provides a sustained and thorough consideration of the history of its subject from 1550 to 1800. Considering print culture in relation to different areas of textual production, The Oxford history of the Irish book discusses areas of print and literature which are further developed in this volume through case studies that provide, for example, quantitative analysis of how print production in Ireland compared to other peripheral print cultures, insight into how literary communities functioned and considerations of the genres that flourished in the distinct literary culture of the city. Together these three earlier works – The Oxford history of the Irish book, Ireland in the Renaissance and Dublin and the Pale in the Renaissance – go far toward describing the features of Renaissance in Ireland while leaving room for further scholarship to identify more specifically those elements that accounted for the rebirth of literary activity in Dublin.

This volume considers the emergence, development and impact of ‘Renaissance’ on literature and literary production in the capital, beginning in the fifteenth century and continuing into the late seventeenth century. This extension of the period under investigation, in contrast to these earlier volumes, allows for a longer chronological space to fully investigate how the literary culture of the Renaissance in Ireland developed over time. Such an approach is supported by Gillespie’s assertion that ‘the language of the Renaissance can be detected in Dublin long before its buildings can’.²¹ While grand architectural projects based on the concepts of classical design that are associated with Renaissance were primarily erected in Dublin in the late seventeenth century, Gillespie demonstrates that the language of civic humanism and the notion of commonwealth used by Dublin Corporation, as well as the print technology to share communications central to the commonwealth, arrived much earlier.²² Furthermore, the circulation of books in the city, most prominently those printed elsewhere, helped to establish the ideas of the Renaissance. The remit of this volume includes detecting the early textual fragments of Dublin’s Renaissance and uncovering these fragments in unexpected places. This volume’s broad chronological span allows its contributors to collectively grapple with the notion of an earlier and longer ‘Renaissance’ than that defined in these earlier three publications, in all its ambiguity and complexity. Building upon the important scholarship contained in these earlier publications, this volume attempts to describe Dublin and its literary cultures in the Renaissance.

Production, consumption, dissemination: Dublin at the periphery of print?

In the seventeenth century, the earl of Cork’s chaplain, Steven Jerome, described Ireland as ‘little bookish’, referring to the scarcity of printed texts.²³ Alexander S. Wilkinson, a contributor to this volume, suggests that it is ‘something of an understatement’ to describe print as coming ‘late’ to Ireland, as only nine works were published in Ireland in vernacular languages before 1601.²⁴ As an apt example, Gillespie cites Dublin’s inadequately capitalised print industry, that industry’s underdeveloped ‘marketing structure’ and low consumer demand as contributing to the dearth of sermons printed in Dublin, in striking contrast to the flourishing production and trade of printed sermons in England.²⁵ Historians and literary critics describing Dublin as a Renaissance city of literature echo similar sentiments to that of Jerome four centuries earlier as they grapple with the relative lack of Irish printing ventures in contrast to those of other European nations.²⁶ Despite this, Irish citizens were engaged in a print culture prior to 1551, when that first book, the Book of common prayer, was published in Dublin by royal printer Humphrey Powell.²⁷ Uniting the issues of print and ‘Renaissance’ in Dublin in this volume, Gillespie suggests that the entrance of the Renaissance in Ireland can be traced to the mid-sixteenth century, when Dublin Corporation harnessed printing to disseminate ‘standardized documents’ and government communications.²⁸ This volume builds upon previous understanding of Dublin’s print culture in the early modern period by focusing on Ireland as joining the ‘third tier of publishing nations’ and regions, which also included Portugal, Scotland, Scandinavia and Eastern Europe, in what Wilkinson describes as a ‘peripheral print culture’.²⁹ While Dublin existed at the periphery of European print culture, and few printed works originated in the city, its inhabitants’ considerable appetite for texts published elsewhere was not thwarted.

The networks of print and manuscript transmission in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries provided citizens with access to printed texts, manuscripts and ideas from across the Continent. Elizabethanne Boran’s contributions to Making Ireland Roman: Irish neo-Latin writers and the Republic of Letters (2009) and The Oxford history of the Irish book illustrate the extent to which printed books and manuscripts were shared in scholarly networks. Boran describes Ussher’s participation in a network of European scholars involved in collecting manuscripts, working within the productive context of Renaissance Europe:

The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries witnessed an explosion in the market for manuscript collecting, not only in the British Isles (especially England) with the dissolution of the monasteries and the subsequent dissemination of their manuscript hoards, but also on the European mainland where war-torn countries offered opportunities to the wily collector.³⁰

The inhabitants of Dublin were connected to discourses emerging elsewhere, in England and on the Continent, by the work of individuals and groups within these networks. Libraries were used by ‘scholarly friendship networks’, which fostered the dissemination of ideas through information sharing in an international context.³¹ Ussher’s friendship network, with its numerous contacts in the British Isles and across Europe and its confessional divisions, could bring news of manuscripts of interest, newly printed books and newly accessible collections.³² Book and manuscript collections, such as Ussher’s, could be augmented by more calculated methods, with agents hired to gather relevant texts or through collectors consulting bibliographical lists.³³ The importation of books allowed Renaissance habits and ideas to gain traction in Dublin before a native printing trade was fully established, and the number of books being imported increased considerably after that first publishing venture in Dublin.³⁴

The Renaissance on the Continent was interpreted and translated locally through access to these imported texts. Mark Empey’s case study of Sir James Ware and his books, included in this volume, describes the habits of an avid consumer of the written word; Ware’s book collection indicates he was keenly aware of works circulating in Europe and often gained access to newly published texts.³⁵ Ware’s records of works he loaned to others, both printed books and manuscripts, suggest something of his tastes as well as the varied intellectual pursuits of those who borrowed material from him.³⁶ Interested Dubliners could access aspects of the vibrant print culture emerging from other publishing centres through the relatively large numbers of books which were imported into the city or through print and manuscript networks. It was this willingness to engage with imported texts, even those composed in other vernaculars, which established the international complexion of print culture in ‘Renaissance’ Dublin. Dublin’s literary culture was not emerging in isolation.

Dublin’s cultural landscape, in fact, bore many connections to that of nearby London. Hadfield outlines similarities in the concerns of the cities’ merchant classes with encouraging trade and protecting their families, and the affliction of plague epidemics that could attack each capital’s population. In addition, Dublin boasted the first professional theatre in the British Isles after London. These connections extended into each city’s literary culture, with many of the Dublin authors addressed in this volume identifying equally with England, including Shirley, Richard Bellings and Spenser (whose A view of the present state of Ireland was set in England), as well as Richard Nugent and Stanihurst, who each had connections to Oxford. The often permeable boundaries between these cities demonstrate the extent to which Dublin’s literary culture was connected to and influenced by that of England, and particularly London, a connection which will be further explored in the chapters that follow. While previous studies such as The Oxford history of the Irish book thoroughly map the print culture that emerged from Ireland, this volume clarifies local aspects of that print culture and illustrates some of the means by which that print culture related to a national and international ‘Renaissance’. Yet constructing this print culture tells only one story of Dublin as a Renaissance city of literature.

Dublin literary identities

Authors used the literary identities they constructed to fashion themselves and their city, reflecting the literary societies present in Dublin in their writing. They idealised the capital city as a geographical location that could foster the fervent intellectual and textual activity associated with ‘Renaissance’. In her contribution to this volume, Theresa O’Byrne describes the composition of Memoriale by James Yonge, a legal clerk in late medieval Dublin. While describing a pilgrimage to the Purgatory of St Patrick, the Memoriale offers a striking description of Dublin as a vibrant, urban centre, a place where citizens asked that the work be composed in Latin, ‘the language of government and of the Church, as well as an international lingua franca’.³⁷ Such constructions of Dublin, which position it as an intellectual centre with a suitably urban identity, may also be found in later texts. Into the early modern period, Dublin was described by authors as a space that fostered the types of activities associated with a literary Renaissance, such as literary communities and networks for print and manuscript transmission. Focusing on literature in print, Andrew Carpenter suggests that the second half of the sixteenth century saw a limited audience for what he describes as ‘polite literature’, and notes that ‘[w]e have little concrete evidence of literary activity in or around Dublin during the first half of the seventeenth century’.³⁸ Such noted limits, however, did not thwart the creation of vibrant literary communities in writings that emerged from this geographical and intellectual space. Literary pursuits formed an essential aspect of the activities of certain citizens, with authors meticulously grafting these experiences of a literary life onto some of the writings produced in the city. Marie-Louise Coolahan, in her chapter, describes the self-fashioning of authors who constructed real and imagined literary communities in their writing. Citing Lodowick Bryskett’s A discourse of civill life (1606), a text that carefully narrates vibrant literary coteries and a gathering of minds that fostered intellectual friendships, Coolahan explains: ‘Most likely, the gathering itself was a fiction. Its value lay precisely in its projection of Renaissance ideals.’³⁹ Dublin, therefore, could also be a fertile location for the birth of Renaissance ideals within literary constructions, taking on an essential role, or identity, in these texts. Without overstating the impact of literary activity in Dublin, this volume seeks to engage with evidence of literary activity and the production of literatures that emerged from Dublin – even if these activities were pursued by a relatively small number of authors. Through the study of Dublin’s ‘textual communities’, either real or only imagined, this volume illuminates the ways in which readers composed and consumed literature in Dublin.⁴⁰ In turn, this volume traces Dublin’s transformation into a centre for literary thought.

Literary identities could also be conveyed, developed and fostered through language choice. These choices carried with them complex meanings, and contributions to this volume touch on translation, Gaelic writing, neo-Latin texts and Anglo-Irish drama. Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin reminds us that ‘Ireland (like many European countries) is a place where the dominance of a single vernacular has been impossible for almost one thousand years’.⁴¹ The ‘cultural as well as linguistic encounters’ that emerged in Renaissance Dublin, as described by Ní Chuilleanáin, is a useful phrase to bear in mind when considering how literary identities in Dublin could be tied to linguistic-political concerns.⁴² Through translation, a writer could graft topical concerns onto a text, a process in which literary identity was articulated through language and the nuance of the translation. Mícheál Mac Craith notes the liberal approach toward translation taken by Gaelic translators in the medieval and early modern periods, revealing a process of revision so thorough that the final translation was ‘so completely transposed into a Gaelic setting that it appeared much more like an original composition than an accurate translation’.⁴³ A number of Gaelic translations of classical texts are more likely to have been based on English translations rather than the Latin originals and are provided with a very local character – Riocard do Búrc’s Fir na Fódla ar ndul d’éag adapts Sir John Harington’s translation of Amores II.iv, suggesting do Búrc consulted books printed in English.⁴⁴ Thus, translation gestures to what different linguistic groups were reading and writing, and which books were available to them. Of course, decisions to communicate in a particular language could make specific statements, as with the Latin orations that emerged from Trinity College Dublin. These works were not only intended to convey the university’s philosophy and broader Renaissance ideals, but they carried in their Latin medium the appropriate tenor for their messages. Jason Harris notes that ‘to speak Latin in a creative and eloquent fashion implied mastery of ancient learning, such saturation in the language and literature of antiquity as only the finest scholars could manage’.⁴⁵ Language and translation, authorial self-representation and descriptions both of literary communities and of Dublin as a suitable space for intellectual activity – these elements coalesced in a literary identity for the city and for individuals responding to that city that corresponded with the spirit of ‘Renaissance’.

Charting Dublin as a Renaissance city of literature

The chapters in this volume are chronologically arranged and chart both Dublin’s emergence as a Renaissance city of literature and the processes of cultural production in early modern Ireland. O’Byrne begins the volume by arguing for the internationalised literary culture of late medieval Dublin in her analysis of Yonge’s Memoriale, justifying the earlier chronology adopted in this volume. Moving forward to the sixteenth century, Gillespie considers books, politics and society, noting that though Dublin’s printing was limited, its citizens engaged with and actively read texts imported from London, adapting and applying their content to the problems they encountered in the capital.

Two case studies follow these early chapters, establishing Dublin as an emerging city of Renaissance literature. Hadfield examines the intellectual culture of Dublin in the late sixteenth century. Focusing on Spenser’s time in the city as secretary to Arthur, Lord Grey de Wilton, the Lord Deputy, the chapter explores Spenser’s political and social connections. Following on from Hadfield’s study of Spenser, David Heffernan examines the literature of complaint emanating from late Elizabethan Dublin. Authors composing this literature of complaint lamented the rampant corruption and abuses present in the country, noting the necessity for significant reform of the government of Ireland. Heffernan outlines the place of this distinctly politicised literary genre within Renaissance Dublin, the success of which depended entirely upon political tensions.

The chapters that follow examine the writings and intellectual communities that contributed to Dublin’s identity as a ‘Renaissance’ space. Coolahan examines the constructed authorial personae of authors residing in Dublin from the late sixteenth century through to the early seventeenth century and their presentation of Dublin as a fitting location for a literary community. Through a consideration of three printed works by Stanihurst, Bellings and Henry Burnell, Coolahan’s chapter opens up concepts of literary friendship in a study that emphasises the geographical dimension of literary work. Empey follows on Coolahan’s study with an appraisal of Sir James Ware’s career constructed through detailed archival research. Empey examines the seventeenth-century historian’s scholarly achievements through an analysis of De praesulibus lageniae sive provinciae Dubliniensis (1628) and then investigates Ware’s extensive intellectual community, revealing an open-minded Dublin community. Together, these chapters suggest an emerging understanding of Dublin as a Renaissance space. Such an understanding was supported by texts produced within and outside of the city, as well as through the intellectual communities that can be traced through archival studies.

The final chapters in this volume consider issues of language and translation that emerged in Dublin and Ireland, with a concluding chapter that examines the intersection between geography and print culture. Ní Chuilleanáin addresses Irish writers’ responses to the international culture of the European Renaissance, examining translation in relation to Bryskett’s A discourse of civill life, as well as the complexities associated with translating the Bible into Irish. Ní Chuilleanáin makes the argument that in addition to being a representative Renaissance activity, translation was harnessed in the country as an ‘instrument of state’ and was believed to have the potential to transform Ireland and its culture. In a second look at translation as a Renaissance activity, Mac Craith describes Irish-language courtly love poems shaped by Ovidian motifs. Looking beyond the literary and anglophone cultures of the Pale, Mac Craith suggests that not only did the classical sources of these poems likely derive from English translations but their Gaelic translators/authors took great liberties with the interpretation of these ‘source’ texts. Mac Craith’s chapter highlights the complexity of literary production and consumption in a politicised multilingual environment. The next chapter, by Harris, offers a ‘stylistic analysis’ of orations from Trinity College Dublin and adds to the previous chapters by emphasising the multi-linguistic character of Renaissance literary production in Dublin. Belonging to the small corpus of surviving works of this nature that emerged in early modern Dublin, these Latin orations carried with them complex connotations of control and harmony; their authors identified themselves as being part of a ‘community that valued civility’.⁴⁶ Stephen Austin Kelly rounds off an interrogation of language in Renaissance Dublin by addressing the question of whether the English-language drama composed and staged in Restoration Dublin is most accurately described as Anglo-Irish drama or ‘English drama written in Ireland’.⁴⁷ Finally, Wilkinson describes Ireland’s place as one of a number of peripheral print cultures, providing context for understanding how Dublin’s literary culture developed from the late medieval period and during the Renaissance.

Dublin: Renaissance city of literature conveys the relationships between different areas of literary production emerging from Renaissance Dublin, going further than existing scholarship to understand and interpret these connections. Though Ireland is correctly described as a peripheral print culture by Wilkinson, early modern authors and intellectuals, writing about and contributing to the intellectual life of the city, enthusiastically positioned Dublin as a vibrant Renaissance city of literature. The chapters in this volume provide a cohesive picture of the city as a real literary space that existed and flourished and as a textually constructed space that supported and furthered Renaissance ideas. In these ways, this volume sets about the task of expanding upon our understanding of Dublin as a Renaissance city of literature.

1  Thomas Herron notes: ‘It is paradoxical and surprising that, despite a late-twentiethcentury surge in literary, historical and cultural studies of Ireland in the period (including imperial, colonial and British studies), as well as new administrative developments . . . our understanding of the term Renaissance in relation to Ireland in scholarly circles is still highly fragmented and hard to find’: Thomas Herron, ‘Introduction: A fragmented Renaissance’, in Michael Potterton and Thomas Herron (eds), Ireland in the Renaissance, c.1540–1660 (Dublin, 2007), pp. 19–39, at p. 31.

2  Howard B. Clarke, Irish historic towns atlas no. 11, Dublin, Part I, to 1610, ed. Anngret Simms et al. (Dublin, 2002); Colm Lennon, Irish historic towns atlas no. 19, Dublin, Part II, 1610–1756, ed. Anngret Simms et al. (Dublin, 2008).

3  Colm Lennon, ‘From Speed to Rocque: The development of early modern Dublin’, Dublin Historical Record 62:1 (2009), pp. 2–15, at p. 2.

4  The two most recent publications listed on the Group’s website, http://ipmag.ie/, are James Lyttleton and Colin Rynne (eds), Plantation Ireland: Settlement and material culture, c.1550–c.1700 (Dublin, 2009); and Audrey Horning and Nick Brannon (eds), Ireland and Britain in the Atlantic world: Irish post-medieval archaeology group proceedings 2 (Dublin, 2010).

5  For example, the ‘Nobility and Newcomers in Renaissance Ireland’ exhibition at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC. For the corresponding catalogue, see Thomas Herron and Brendan Kane, Nobility and newcomers in Renaissance Ireland (Washington DC, 2013).

6  Alan Ford, ‘Apocalyptic Ireland: 1580–1641’, Irish Theological Quarterly 78:2 (2013), pp. 123–48.

7  Alan Ford, ‘Making dead men speak: Manipulating the memory of James Ussher’, in Mark Williams and Stephen Paul Forrest (eds), Constructing the past: Writing Irish history, 1600–1800 (Woodbridge, Suffolk, 2010), pp. 49–69.

8  Alan Ford, ‘Past but still present: Edmund Borlase, Richard Parr and the reshaping of Irish history for English audiences in the 1680s’, in Brian MacCuarta SJ (ed.), Reshaping Ireland, 1550–1700 (Dublin, 2011), pp. 281–99.

9  Mark A. Hutchinson, ‘The emergence of the state in Elizabethan Ireland and England, ca. 1575–99’, Sixteenth Century Journal 45:3 (2014), pp. 659–82, at p. 661.

10  Andrew Carpenter, Verse in English from Tudor and Stuart Ireland (Cork, 2003).

11  The correspondence of James Ussher, 1600–1656, 3 vols, ed. Elizabethanne Boran (Dublin, 2015).

12  Herron, ‘Introduction: A fragmented Renaissance’, pp. 19–39.

13  Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Óenach: Journal of the Forum for Medieval and Renaissance Studies in Ireland: Reviews, 1:1 (2009), pp. 1–9, http://oenach.files.wordpress.com/2008/09/herron12.pdf, accessed 20 March 2011; cited in Michael Potterton, ‘Introduction: The Fitzgeralds, Florence, St Fiachra and a few fragments’, in Michael Potterton and Thomas Herron (eds), Dublin and the Pale in the Renaissance, c.1540–1660 (Dublin, 2011), pp. 19–47, at p. 40.

14  Potterton, ‘Introduction: The Fitzgeralds, Florence, St Fiachra and a few fragments’, p. 40.

15  Eva Griffith, ‘James Shirley and the earl of Kildare: Speculating playhouses and dwarves à la mode’, in Michael Potterton and Thomas Herron (eds), Dublin and the Pale in the Renaissance, c.1540–1660 (Dublin, 2011), pp. 352–71.

16  Thomas Herron, ‘Pale martyr: Politicizing Richard Stanihurst’s Aenis’, in Michael Potterton and Thomas Herron (eds), Dublin and the Pale in the Renaissance, c.1540–1660 (Dublin, 2011), pp. 291–317, at p. 292.

17  Brendan Kane, ‘Languages of legitimacy? An Ghaeilge, the earl of Thomond and British politics in the Renaissance Pale, 1600–24’, in Michael Potterton and Thomas Herron (eds), Dublin and the Pale in the Renaissance c.1540–1660 (Dublin, 2011), pp. 267–79.

18  Kane, ‘Languages of legitimacy?’, pp. 269, 274.

19  Willy Malley, ‘‘‘The name of the country I have forgotten": Remembering and dismembering in Sir Henry Sidney’s Irish Memoir (1583)’, in Michael Potterton and Thomas Herron (eds), Ireland in the Renaissance, c.1540–1660 (Dublin, 2007), pp. 52–73, at p. 53.

20  Valerie McGowan-Doyle, ‘Fall of Princes: Lydgate, Sir Henry Sidney and Tudor conquest in The Book of Howth’, in Michael Potterton and Thomas Herron (eds), Ireland in the Renaissance, c.1540–1660 (Dublin, 2007), pp. 74–87.

21  See Gillespie’s chapter in this volume.

22  See Gillespie’s chapter in this volume.

23  Stephen Jerome, Irelands Jubilee or Irelands Joyes lo-paen (Dublin, 1624), sig. A3; cited in Raymond Gillespie, ‘Irish printing in the early seventeenth century’, Irish Economic and Social History 15 (1988), pp. 81–8, at p. 86.

24  See Wilkinson’s chapter in this volume.

25  Raymond Gillespie, ‘Preaching the Reformation in early modern Ireland’, in Peter McCullough, Hugh Adlington and Emma Rhatigan (eds), The Oxford handbook of the early modern sermon (Oxford, 2011), pp. 287–302, at p. 288.

26  Herron notes in his introduction to Ireland in the Renaissance that Ireland is entirely absent from a map of Europe included in Elizabeth Eisenstein’s The printing