Exploring Edmund Spenser's writings within the historical and aesthetic context of colonial agricultural reform in Ireland, his adopted home, this study demonstrates how Irish events and influences operate in far more of Spenser's work than previously suspected. Thomas Herron explores Spenser's relation to contemporary English poets and polemicists in Munster, such as Sir Walter Raleigh, Ralph Birkenshaw and Parr Lane, as well as heretofore neglected Irish material in Elizabethan pageantry in the 1590s, such as the famously elaborate state performances at Elvetham and Rycote. New light is shed here on the Irish significance of both the earlier and later Books of The Fairie Queene. Herron examines in depth Spenser's adaptation of the paradigm of the laboring artist for empire found in Virgil's Georgics, which Herron weaves explicitly with Spenser's experience as an administrator, property owner and planter in Ireland. Taking in history, religion, geography, classics and colonial studies, as well as early modern literature and Irish studies, this book constitutes a valuable addition to Spenser scholarship.

John Derricke's Image of Irelande, with a Discoverie of Woodkarne is a key work of English print-making, Irish and English history and cultural misunderstanding. The work attests to the complexity of English and Irish relations, colonisation, military history, imperial propaganda, poetry, art, printing and the forging of identity in the early modern British Isles. The original work comprises of a lengthy poetic narrative and twelve famous woodcuts of the highest quality produced in sixteenth-century England. They also represent some of the only contemporary views of early modern Ireland on record. The sixteen interdisciplinary essays in this collection focus on the text's political and historical meaning, print history, iconographic elements, paratexts, literary and artistic influences, and cultural archaeology. The collection will appeal to scholars of many disciplines. -- .

Raleigh's activities in Ireland, like the rest of his life, continue to fascinate. How incredible and unethical were his initial military exploits? What role did he play in planning and executing the Munster Plantation? How does his colonial activity in the New World compare with that in Ireland? How influential was he in shaping Queen Elizabeth I's Irish policy?This fascinating but little-known work, written by a controversial Irish-born British colonial governor and first published in 1883, is especially valuable today for its extensive reproduction of original sources connected with Raleigh's stay in Ireland, including many of his Irish letters. It is a useful place to begin exploring this multi-faceted character whom Pope Hennessy describes as 'one of the most daring and active of those eminent Englishmen who have done much to render British government permanently difficult - if not more than difficult - in Ireland'.