Masculinity and political geographies in England, Ireland and North America

Abstract

Historians have recently turned their attention to the place of masculinity in the politics of early-modern England. This essay widens that exploration to include the imperial settings of Ireland and North America. Drawing upon a range of English- and Irish-language sources – including political treatises, maps, state papers and court poetry – it contends that manhood, as a relational value between men, helped structure the form and character of politics in the metropole, the kingdom of Ireland and the American colonies. In all of those settings, the definition of acceptable male behaviour was different, the effect being that political action and theory in each place took on unique features. Consequently, the essay cautions against studying England and its colonies as distinct units of historical analysis and calls for further exploration of the particularities of colonial settings and their influence on the imperial centre. Moreover, the essay aims to demonstrate that masculinity, particularly contest over its proper expression, is an agent in historical change, in this case helping to shape political theory and practice as England developed into a multiple monarchy and budding imperial power in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.

Keywords::

• civil–savage discourse
• bardic poetry
• English colonialism
• Atlantic world
• cartography
• Burghley
• Earl of Essex
• ethnography
• knowledge and power
• state formation

The present study explores ways in which masculinity played a role in how English observers understood and shaped political relations and imperatives during the colonial expansions of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. In doing so it aims to broaden the frames through which historians interpret that expansion. Historians still frequently approach England as a discrete unit of historical analysis, and its colonial territories collectively as another.1 Whatever its many virtues, this approach collapses important distinctions in how the metropole and its peripheries actually interacted and what sorts of policies were planned and initiated in each. Put another way, Irish and Indians continue to be designated as comparable colonised ‘others’ defined against an English nation marching steadily into the modern. This creation of a binary out of what is, at the very minimum, a tripartite phenomenon is less a product of the sources than of selective reading. Whatever the reasons driving it, however, it is a binary that has proven resistant to complication or revision.2 Revisiting the sources with an eye to masculinity, rather than searching for generic examples of cultural denigration, can bring to light crucial distinctions in how these people and places appeared in the English imperial mind and how the experience of governance existed in each. In the end, I suggest that the study of masculinity can make its contribution to understanding those peculiar conjunctures of concerns and contexts – distance, history, religion, economics, ethnicity, race and so on – that determine the character of the political geographies of the British Atlantic world.3

The article builds upon foundational work on masculinity in early-modern England in order to address questions concerning the early-modern ‘British’ Atlantic. For this period in European history, the English historiography of manhood is well developed relative to that for continental polities.4 As early as 1995, Anthony Fletcher produced a ‘survey’ of gender in England, 1500–1800. While he did not believe the field was developed enough to allow a ‘synthesis’, he nevertheless found sufficient secondary literature to buttress an exploration of changes in gender assumptions and behaviours over three centuries.5 Before and since Fletcher's survey, the scholarship of manhood in early-modern England has been richly interdisciplinary, many of the pioneering studies being conducted by literary scholars.6 The present essay takes inspiration from the increasing, if still sporadic, attention given to masculinity and high politics, particularly as concerns the tumultuous decade of the 1640s.7 As Anne Hughes has recently argued in her Gender and the English Revolution, historians have lagged behind those whose primary disciplinary home is English, an imbalance she helped rectify with a chapter dedicated to ‘Manhood and Civil War’.8 In elucidating the links between manhood and high politics, scholars such as Hughes, Hilda Smith, Diane Purkiss and others implicitly suggest that much might be gained by extending beyond the domestic realm and addressing issues of masculinity in the sphere of imperial politics and policies.9 For the Tudor and early Stuart period there is limited work in this vein, a situation that stands in stark contrast to the large and growing literature on gender, generally, and masculinity, specifically, in England and its empire from the mid-seventeenth century to the present.10 This essay, consequently, will concern itself with the Elizabethan and early Stuart periods.

When thinking in the earlier imperial context, Alexandra Shepard's pioneering approach to understanding changing modes of masculinity and civility within England has great utility.11 Shepard notes that English ‘[n]ormative manhood was primarily defined through comparison with a broad range of “deviant” others’.12 English writings on Ireland and the Americas were, as we are constantly reminded, largely concerned with encounter with the other, between civility and savagery. What role then, if any, did notions of masculinity and manhood play in settings where civility was thought to be absent? Did they affect or help guide imperial thought and action? Were they affected in turn by cultural contact and the effort to govern ‘others’ at a distance? If so, then how did it look, tracked across time, when defined against the ‘others’ encountered in the course of colonial expansion?

In arguing that attention to masculinity can highlight crucial social and political differences among England's early colonial holdings, and in how policymakers envisioned those holdings in their conceptions of the budding imperial state, this paper proceeds in three parts, each of which is brief and suggestive of ideas for further research rather than comprehensive. The initial task is to use the lens of manhood as a way to point out distinctions between colonial Ireland and British North America. To do so, Part I compares contemporaneous English treatises concerning Ireland and the Americas and argues for seeing them as constituting two broad categories of investigation: those of surveillance and those of ‘wonder’.13 The former describes those focused on Ireland, for they appear quite similar to tracts of predatory governance composed by agents of the monarchy in and for England itself, such as urban reform plans and proto-census records.14 The latter category marks those on the ‘New World’, the closest analogues for which were contemporaneous travel writings and classical ethnographies. There are overlaps between the two but these are largely superficial, comparisons between Irish and Indians being more metaphorical and/or heuristic than ethnographically substantive. I attempt to demonstrate the differences in these works by drawing attention to the fact that whereas English musings on the Irish are characterised by running tallies of local men and their violations of the gender expectations deemed normative in the metropole, those on the Indians reveal a curiosity about physical traits, gender-specific actions and behaviours, and relations between the sexes explored in local rather than comparative terms. Nowhere is this multivalent curiosity more strikingly demonstrated than in maps and illustrations. My preliminary research suggests that maps in the Irish case depict as much a cultural as a physical geography, one in which space is marked according to local lord or colonial proprietor, invariably male in both cases; maps of the New World are more starkly cartographic, concerned with physical features of the landscape. As for images of the local people, depictions of Indians surpass those of the Irish both in detail and in production quality and serve to educate readers on the most basic aspects of normative activities of Indian men and women. These ‘others’, then, if not monsters, were alien enough from known social forms and norms that the ‘cultural construction’ of gender found in treatises on the Americas is closely, and I would argue uniquely within those areas claimed by Tudor and Stuart authority, intertwined with the emergent discourse of race.15 As such, Indians were subject to a more fundamentally invasive ethnographic gaze, one more closely aligned with tracts of travel, ‘science’ and wonder than of governance and reform. Thus, attention to masculinity – as depicted in text and image – reveals distinctions in English views and governance of Ireland and the Americas that otherwise get elided in studies that posit them as comparable theatres of English/British colonialism.

Having argued that the discourse of masculinity in tracts on the Irish is more ‘metropolitan’ than ‘wondrous’ in tone and content, Part II proceeds to explore what precisely English observers were saying about Irish men and manhood. This section describes Ireland's place in an on-going debate over English manhood and suggests that concerns over masculinity were an important spur to colonial expansion there. As English men fretted over the emasculating effects of subordination to a pacifist queen, many of them saw the second realm as the one in which martial skills could be perpetuated and honed. To these observers, Ireland was not simply a place where English men built empire, it was a place where English males could be ‘English men’ by fighting and duelling. But if these officers, soldiers and grandees were, to bastardise a famous line, more English in Ireland than in England itself, they also faced the threat of losing touch there with another and equally vital aspect of contemporary normative masculinity: the self-control associated with civility. Whereas martial violence was good and to be practised, wanton and unchecked violence was bad and to be squelched.16 That English transplants would go native, or ‘degenerate’, was always a fear of those who opined on governing Ireland. But while scholars have investigated the discourse of ‘degeneration’ from a broadly cultural perspective, they have been less attentive to that discourse's peculiarly gendered inflections.17 This section ends, then, with a brief discussion of Ireland as place of danger for English masculinity and, in turn, for the state's ability to curb the excesses of male power that seemed naturally to follow from too much liberty.18

The paper's third and final section argues that Irish notions of manhood were threatened by much more than state efforts to domesticate the indigenous warrior caste. The English ‘reconquest’ of Ireland challenged Irish definitions and expectations of masculinity, too. Part III begins by expanding our understanding of Irish aristocratic masculinity and demonstrates both its similarities to, and differences from, English norms. Irish nobles were European nobles, not exotic ‘others’ (as noted in Part I), and English monarchs knew this – it was for this reason that local elites were welcomed into the Tudor and Stuart aristocracies once the island was made a kingdom under the English monarchy in 1541.19 Nevertheless, the mental and cultural worlds of these ‘British’ grandees were not coterminous; there were fundamental distinctions between them, the navigation of which would prove transformative of longstanding masculine ideals in Ireland. Most dramatically, the language of marriage and lovers that linked lord and poet, and the ‘democratic’ masculinity enabled by partible inheritance and elective succession, were incompatible with English aristocratic manhood. As a result, under Tudor rule, Irish manhood would lose the characteristics of sexual potency and, for lack of a better term, equality that traditionally marked it: bards, who for centuries had sung the praises of the ‘good-looking and irresistible’, now joined the ranks of (celibate) church intellectuals; Irish lords would have to sire an heir in matrimony or lose control of the dynastic line; and younger sons and male relatives, no longer legitimate or realistic claimants for patriarchal lordship, were emasculated by primogeniture.20

In sum, these three parts work together to think critically about the peculiarities of political geographies in the Tudor and early Stuart worlds and to lead to a more nuanced understanding of how empire emerges and functions, as well as how fundamental concerns over gender affect, and are affected by, that process. In attempting to do so, I have endeavoured to use comparable sources when possible. Treatises of governance and elite correspondence are used throughout all three sections, for they are applicable to the three geographic areas considered. However, Part I uniquely uses maps and bodily representations as they serve to highlight the Americas’ unique position within contemporary English thought and governmental practice. Part III draws upon Irish-language political poetry and religious polemic. Not only does the mere existence of these sources further the argument for significantly different conditions obtaining in ‘colonial’ Ireland and America, they offer our best source for the Irish perspective in debates over masculinity within English–Irish relations of the period. Those debates, indeed the entire discussion of competing notions of manhood discussed in this paper, apply to elites, although one could work through the treatises to get further down the social hierarchy. That there was no normative, unifying sense of manhood across the polities (ostensibly) ruled from London bolsters the ensuing study's aim to demonstrate that gender can be a causal agent in historical developments. Often historians use gender in a descriptive mode: it provides a vocabulary and conceptual frame with which to compare various settings and mentalities across space and time. Here masculinity plays a more robust role in historical change. Following Diane Purkiss's wonderfully provocative line that ‘a lot of criticism and history are about masculinity in an unacknowledged fashion, masculinity masquerading as universality or as “politics”’, I contend that concerns over manhood actually provoke thoughts and actions that result in significant and lasting social, cultural and political change.21

Part I. Sex, gender and England's westward expansion

A survey of the relevant scholarly literature on early-modern British imperial expansion might suggest severe limits to the usefulness of gender as a category of historical analysis. Repeatedly we are told that English observers saw the Irish and Indians as savages requiring harsh treatment to bring them to civility. If these colonised others, separated from the English more by race than by culture, were really so outside English norms that they appeared barbarous, even monstrous, what could be gained by approaching imperial writings and encounters from the perspective of gender? When compared against metropolitan gender norms, the natives are necessarily going to be found wanting. In the realm of imperial politics in the early-modern period, then, there might appear to be little to gain from exploring notions of masculinity, other than perhaps compiling a list of savage behaviours that English commentators attributed to males in Ireland and the Americas alike, an approach congenial to reinforcing commonplaces about cruel-to-be-kind governance as the path to civility. Such an exercise might tell us about the prejudices of English imperial commentators, but it seems to allow for little of the sort of nuanced historical insight into society, politics and change over time that studies of masculinity have provided for early-modern English society itself. Barbarians are barbarians no matter where they lurk, and monsters have no gender.22

Yet, looking at imperial writings through the lens of masculinity can enable us to see useful differences in how English observers conceived of the Irish as opposed to Indians. Undoubtedly, there were similarities in how indigenous men and their behaviours were described, most commonly that they were indolent, hyper-sexualised and given to exploiting inferiors. In short, they were petty – if rather lazy – tyrants.23 But much of this is standard fare in writings on non-nationals. As Andrew Hadfield crisply notes in discussing the early seventeenth-century English traveller and essayist Fynes Moryson, he ‘like many other travellers, appears to have used his wide experience to denigrate virtually all the cultures and peoples with which he came into contact’.24 What one reads of Indians and the Irish seems to occupy the same conceptual space as do written accounts of Turks, Russians, Africans and others who fell below English ideals of civility. Moreover, damning native men as domestic tyrants is a theme in justificatory writings on imperial expansion from Fermanagh to Fallujah – invading soldiers are eternally the ‘saviours’ of women, children and civility.

On closer inspection, however, the similarities drawn between Irish and Indians may be less instructive than the perceived differences.25 For while there are undeniable, and important, thematic links in descriptions of the two groups (as noted above), there is a crucial distinction in the vocabularies deployed to discuss males on either side of the Atlantic. If the Irish were seen as barbarous and savage in custom and practice, the Indians were seen as barbarians and savages in essence. This is to say that in the New World context, the nouns were used – in the Irish context, the adjectives.

Again, it is a commonplace in the literature that English commentators referred to Irish and Indians alike as barbarians and/or savages.26 Yet it is curious how infrequently actual examples are given. We would expect, for instance, to see such usage in the works of Edmund Spenser and Sir John Davies, the canonised architects of anti-Irish imperialist thought.27 In reading through Spenser's A View of the Present State of Ireland I have found 13 examples of barbarous, and three of savage used adjectively. There is one instance of ‘barbarian’, but it is a historical reference to Moors and Africans. In Davies, there are also occasional uses of ‘barbarous’, but not a single use of barbarian or savage.28 And if we are to think that the Irish-American connection is to be found in the writings of polemicists and advocates of expansion and plantation, then I have to wonder why, in my reading of every single policy treatise and device found in the Carew collection of State Papers covering the years 1500–1610, I have not run across the word once. (There are enough documents in this collection to account for a six-volume calendar.) I have also been tracking these words in the State Papers, Ireland, an immense and varied collection of documents now held in the UK National Archives, which offers the most detailed foundation for tracking English efforts to bring Ireland under Crown authority.29 Within that material I started with documents from the 1570s – the point when an ideology of ethnographic otherness is supposed to have taken off30 – and yet again, no instances. There are occasional references to barbarous custom, action, behaviour and ways. But, as noted above, this was the same language aimed at domestic enemies, the poor, Catholics, the Scots, Turks, Russians and so on. Strikingly, once we move to materials written about the New World natives, we encounter the terms ‘barbarian’ and ‘savage’ immediately. William Strachey in The Historie of Travel into Virginia Britania (1583), for instance, writes of the ‘Barbarians in these new discoveries’.31 Captain John Smith writing on the Chesapeake, and Sir George Peckham recounting voyages farther north in the ‘Newfound lands’, both speak frequently of those encountered as ‘savages’.32 The list could easily be extended.

In short, whatever the gendered discourse regarding Ireland and the Irish may have been, it did not operate in the same register of racial difference and encounter that marked English writings on the Americas. In 1573 Queen Elizabeth asked of courtiers seeking to plant the Ards Peninsula in east Ulster: ‘What kind of people inhabit these countries, how are they ruled, by whom and by what laws and customs, what rents, tributes or other services they pay and to whom, and whereof do they levy the same?’33 In its demand for information on ‘what kind of people’, the question might seem to suggest a sense that English and Irish are separated by kind rather than degree. However, the asking after law and tribute suggests a more prosaic sense of difference definable in terms of politics and allegiance, which indeed is the approach taken by those who, over the course of the reign, provided answers to such monarchical ‘ethnographic’ curiosity. Thus one observer noted that while the ‘people in Ireland’ were of ‘divers sorts’, those sorts were mundanely political in origin: ‘obedient, disobedient and indifferent’.34 And so they were bound to be for, as Lord Chancellor William Gerard opined in 1586, the spread of the common law to Wales was the model for governing Ireland. The ‘civilising’ of the Irish, then, was something to be plotted along the continuum of ‘internal colonialism’ rather than placed in the category of imperial encounters overseas.35

Nowhere are these differences more apparent than in the images that accompany the various texts associated with the Tudor reconquest of the island. A curious phenomenon in the scholarly literature on English ‘overseas’ encounters is failure to notice that materials dealing with Ireland lack the detailed illustrations found in those concerned with the Americas. In the hundreds of surviving tracts and treatises that flooded into Westminster under the Tudors and early Stuarts on how best to govern Ireland, there are almost no images of the Irish. Barnabe Googe's sketch of Turlough Luineach O'Neill is famous precisely for its uniqueness (Figure 1).36 Perhaps we should not be surprised: policy manuscripts would seem both generically and formally to discourage illustration. However, the print record is similarly bare. When Spenser's treatise on Ireland was eventually published, 30-odd years after its composition, there were no images added, nor were any added to Davies’ equally famous tract. The same applies to Thomas Churchyard's pamphlets on late sixteenth-century Munster and the Desmond Rebellions, to Barnabe Riche's early Jacobean surveys of Ireland and the martial life, and on and on. There are notable exceptions to this graphic void. Famously, Albrecht Dürer and John Speed produced images of Irish figures. These offer poor evidence of colonial ‘othering’, however. Speed included images of Irish nobles and gentlemen on his map of Ireland (first published, 1606) (Figure 2), but he included similar images of elite dress with all his maps of Europe, England included. Dürer's ink and watercolour depictions of ‘Irish warriors and peasants’ clearly was not a product of the English imperial zeitgeist, but was executed on the continent, based on available drawings not living models, and was part of a compendium of interesting costumes reaching from his immediate surroundings to Asia.37 John Derrick's The Image of Irelande (1581), a celebration in verse of Sir Henry Sidney's deputyship, which was accompanied by woodcuts (Figure 3), presents the most compelling case for ethnographic representation in the colonial mode, for its illustrations are uniquely concerned with Ireland and its governance, and capture the cultural as well as physical features of its human subjects.38

Figure 1 Turlough Luineach O'Neill, as drawn by Barnabe Googe. This image is reproduced courtesy of The National Archives, London, UK. [SP 63/45, no 60 (ii)].

Figure 2 John Speed (1552?–1629). Theatre of the Empire of Great Britaine (London: [T. Snodham], 1616), folding plate between page 137 and page 138: Map of Ireland. Folger Shakespeare Library Shelfmark: STC 23044. Used by permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Figure 3 Image of Rory O'More, from John Derrick, The Image of Irelande, with a discouerie of VVoodkarne (1581). This image reproduced courtesy of the Edinburgh University Library [De.3.76].

Nevertheless, two things separate them from the images of the Indians. The first is their comparative aesthetic crudity. On the one hand this is a matter of execution. Theodor De Bry's publication of the engraving ‘A weroan or great Lorde of Virginia’ (1590, based on John White's original drawing) (Figure 4), is an anatomical masterpiece revealing muscular structure, facial features and tattooing of his near-naked subject. But it is also a matter of posing and perspective: the depiction of both front and rear views of the weroan demonstrates an interest to visually know and define this ‘savage’ that simply does not exist in Derrick's elementary portrayals of frontal poses. In the background we see what Indian men do and how: they hunt, and do so on foot with the bow and arrow he has also carefully studied from front and back perspective. Valerie Traub, however, has demonstrated that those images in de Bry that isolate the body from any contextual background bring about yet ‘greater systematising effect’; there is nothing comparable to this in English visualisations of the Irish.39

Figure 4 “A weroan or great Lorde of Virginia,” Thomas Hariot, A briefe and true report (Frankfurt, 1590). Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University [06192-5].

The second difference in the representation of Irish and Indian men in Derrick and White/De Bry is the relationship in each between image and text. Derrick's images, while they bear obvious reference to Gaelic bodies and cultural otherness, are linked to a text that is driven by political concerns over allegiance and loyalty. That text, a long praise poem in rhyme, celebrates Lord Deputy Sir Henry Sidney's triumphs over Irish rebels in the late 1570s. Every image of the Irish – and of Sidney and the English too – exists to highlight the Deputy's vanquishing of a local warrior class and maps seamlessly onto stanzas describing the military and political subjection of named rebels (for instance, the famous image of the mantle-wearing Gaelic lord in the woods represents Rory O'More, head of an important midlands aristocratic family (or sept), who is made to bewail in Latin his rash treason against his queen who previously had favoured him, ‘ve mihi misero …’). Irish men are described here in letter and illustration as rebellious subjects brought to heel by Elizabeth's chosen representative in her second realm. Their transgressive masculinity – favouring wanton power over civil control – is tameable by the state, a task that according to Derrick was seen to by Sidney. In contrast, the text accompanying the White/De Bry images, penned by Thomas Harriot and published in the same decade as Derrick, is not linked to them in the same explicitly political way. Like the illustrations, this text is invasively ethnographic and expressly physiological. The relationships depicted here are not between men from different cultural backgrounds vying for political power (for example, Sidney and O'More), but rather between natives from different American regions via their respective customs, and between the sexes. Harriot notes, for instance, that ‘Princes in Virginia’ paint their bodies in a manner distinct from that found among Indian men in ‘Florida’.40 Rather than overt comparison to English norms or political claims, images of an Indian woman (front and back perspectives given here, too) and of an Indian man and woman seated over a meal, work to construct a sense of masculinity grounded in gendered local social practices.

Perhaps we may even be able to identify a sense for scientific versus cultural depictions of masculinity in the very representation of the American and Irish landscapes. Maps of the New World mirror the objectifying gaze revealed in images of Indian bodies in that they emphasise borders and physical aspects of the landscape over identification of its inhabitants (Figure 5). This practice was not ‘scientific’ in any sense that the interests of those cartographers were apolitical (or prepolitical); it had only to do with natural features. The eliding of human habitation and local political geographies undoubtedly served to render the land tabula rasa and therefore in need of knowing and improving.41 Maps of Ireland, however, mark the land by local lordships; in doing so they portray physical space explicitly in terms of contested ownership by male elites. Thus a ‘rough sketch’ of Cork composed c.1570 traces out the general boundary lines – an obvious cartographic necessity for the area in question – while also designating territory by the presence of patrilineal dynasties (Figure 6). Mapmakers and their audiences wished to know who claimed the land and the boundaries of those claims. It is no surprise, therefore, that on subsequent plantation maps, this masculine gendering of placenaming was simply recapitulated. Francis Jobson's The Province of Munster, c.1589, identifies land by male owner, only now some of those proprietors are English, such as ‘Sr Waram St Lenger’ and ‘Sr Walter Rawley’ (Figure 7). The English, like the Irish, tended to think of land, abstractly, in the feminine. Bardic poets traditionally described political harmony as deriving from the union of the legitimate ruler and his spouse, or territory, a practice that continued in the inaugural eulogies when James VI succeeded Elizabeth I in 1603.42 Yet cartographically Irish land was predominantly marked according to masculine ownership, not by settlement names or physical features as was the case for England and America. This is a speculative argument, and more work would need to be done to develop or dismiss it. It is certainly the case that plantation maps in the Americas and Caribbean marked land by colonial proprietor, but it is unclear from my initial research whether that practice systematically included the naming of adjacent lands according to native lords or lineages. Yet if we match the maps of Cork with the depictions of O'More in Derrick's Image of Irelande we see that knowledge and power, land and politics, were matters worked out in a particular masculine register found in Ireland and not America: the masculine causal drive in new-world expansion being linked to competition with other European empire-builders and, presumably, with the honour of knowledge production;43 that in Ireland was aligned with power struggles amongst elite male subjects of the Crown.44

Figure 5 “A mapp of Virginia discouered to ye Hills, and in it's Latt: From 35 deg: & 1/2 neer Florida to 41 deg: bounds of new England” (London, 1651). Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University [8189–22].

Figure 6 Map of Cork (1570). This image is reproduced courtesy of The National Archives, London, UK. [SP 63/30, f. 222].

Figure 7 Francis Jobson, “The Province of Mounster.” This image is reproduced courtesy of the National Library of Ireland [16 B 13].

Part II. The English man in Ireland: empowerment and emasculation

But of course those Irish lords named on English maps were thought unfit for the land – thus the plantations – which begs the question of how precisely they failed as men. A list, by no means exhaustive, includes dishonesty, ambition, greed and covetousness, hypersexuality, irreligion, violence and being warlike yet unschooled in the ways of war. Moreover, they showed no respect for the bonds of matrimony, as they were thought to divorce at a whim, or for the law more generally (be it of the Brehon, that is, traditional Irish, or ‘common’ variety), being quick to play the outlaw. The chief complaint against Irish lords was, as noted above, their tyranny over inferiors, particularly women and children.45 The locus classicus of this particular transgression was the practice of coign and livery – basically the forcible billeting of troops and officers upon commoners – and rare is the tract or treatise that failed to condemn it. Broadly speaking, however, coign and livery was simply shorthand for the range of might-makes-right abuses of masculine power committed by Gaelic and gaelicised Old English lords as a matter of course46, highlights of which I have noted above.

But, as suggested in Part I, English commentaries on Irish men by contrast to discussion of Indians came couched in the comparative language of normative gender expectations and their transgression, not in that of bodies and sexes. The ‘civilising’ of Wales, as noted above, was frequently – if by no means exclusively – taken to be the model for governing Ireland. Other theorists on England's Irish question reached more deeply into the past to make sense of the relationship between the expanding British state and Irish elite men, the best known example being Spenser's genealogical linking of the Gaels to the Scythians.47 One noteworthy and anonymous treatise drew on a different classical reference and compared the late Elizabethan rebel, Hugh O'Neill, Earl of Tyrone, to Jugurtha, King of Numidia. As Jugurtha had gone from favourite to rebel, so did O'Neill. Both were fostered under the eye of the state and propped up in positions of great power on the imperial periphery. Yet on account of overweening ambition – masculine hubris unchecked by civil restraint – they both turned on those who had favoured them. The telling of this story was, according to its author, educative, for ‘in the portraitures and resemblances which the right use and observations of histories doth afford, The comparisons, similitude, and dissimilitude of men's manners, and actions, is not of the least use and effecte.’48 This narrative, which concerns the difficulty of domesticating overmighty male subjects, is a far cry from the classical precedent referenced by Raleigh who, in his discussion of the Guineans, claims to have been told by a Spaniard of the local presence of the Ewaiponema, ‘which are those without heades’.49 The issue in Ireland was overcoming elite men's ingratitude and vaunting ambition, not coming to terms with acephalous gender-defying monsters.

Key to the Irish setting, then, was determining what kind of man was best suited to guide the likes of O'Neill firmly and finally into the civilised fold of Tudor, Anglicised society. There seems no analogue to this in contemporaneous writings on the American ventures, which by contrast largely concerned matters of trade and its many benefits.50 Yet what type of man should be initially exported to Ireland was a crucial question of governance, which raged in the tracts and treatises dedicated to the second realm. Most obviously, there was the contingent that, fearful of rebellion, believed that the ‘first step’ toward civil order was ‘to send a worthy gentleman thither to be her Deputy, that hath a stirring martial spirit and an able body’.51 Others were more cautious, and favoured officials of ‘good nature’, who were ‘discreet’, ‘wise’, even non-martial and possessing the vernacular language of those over whom they were to govern, namely Gaelic. A further common sentiment was that ‘manurers of the soil’ were most needed in Ireland, for they would civilise the land through their labour and the indigenous population through their modelling of Christian diligence and sobriety. Unsurprisingly, of course, there were those who advocated some combination of all three: the martial, the wise and the labouring. This typically played out in hierarchical or chronological terms: martial leaders of an army of farmers, or military men sent first to soften the land for the arrival of English planters. As one anonymous tract memorably put it, the situation called for ‘divers manly men’ – soldier-officers to establish and maintain law and order and artificers, farmers and fishermen to transform the island from wilds into garden.52 The masculine discourse of colonial expansion into Ireland, then, was a complex one that asked but did not answer the fundamental question of who precisely was the ideal imperial male.

The debate over imperial masculinity in the second realm concerned England as much as Ireland. More was at stake for English commentators than taming wild Irish lords. In play, too, was the definition of English manhood itself, for the push to populate Ireland with martial men was very much a product of English men's anxieties over not meeting expectations of gender. Although competing definitions of manhood circulated amongst policymakers in the Elizabethan and Jacobean courts, soldiering and arms were vital elements of them all. This is obvious in the neo-chivalric ethos of men like Sir Philip Sidney and the 2^nd Earl of Essex.53 It was also an important component of the ‘service nobility’ embodied by Lord Burghley and his son and successor, the eventual Earl of Salisbury.54 Sidney and Essex, of course, lived the warrior's life, and their antagonistic relations with the decidedly non-martial Cecils are well known and documented in the literature, the pairs typically taken to represent the poles in a contemporary debate over English masculine honour. But those differences can be overstated, for whereas Burghley was not interested in personally fighting in defence of international Protestantism, as Sidney and Essex were, he was desperate that someone should do so, on account of his fear that English men would go soft and thus render the realm ripe for invasion by the Spanish, seasoned as they were by constant campaigning. All parties in this particular debate on English masculinity, then, agreed that to be an English man required schooling in the arts of war.55

But where was that education to occur? Clearly not at home, the civilised core of empire overseen by a cautious, pacific queen. Nor was it to take place on the continent – Elizabeth was greatly reluctant to enter the wars of religion – nor in the Americas, whatever the exploits of the odd seadog. Numerous men cut their military teeth in the Low Countries or preying on Spanish shipping. But the numbers were not enough to keep even the conservative Burghley from fretting that ‘the realm is become so feeble by long peace as it were a fearful thing to imagine, if the enemies were at hand to assail the realm, of what force the resistance would be’.56 Thus, Ireland, by the 1570s, provided the only place where English men, in any number, could practice the martial skills that were so crucial to key contemporary definitions of manhood.

This was not ideal, for Ireland was always a sideshow and fighting there a mere consolation to those who wished to flex their muscles on the continent. Nevertheless, rebellions there were termed ‘war’ and suppressed as such, and if the choice was service in those ‘domestic’ campaigns or nothing, then the choice was clear. Letters poured into court from those seeking places in the Irish wars, and English men hoped thus to be able to stay competitive with those whom they considered their real rivals: the martial men of continental Catholic realms. Some brief examples should help make the case. Essex, of course, was Lord Lieutenant in Ireland and charged with suppressing Tyrone's rebellion (1594–1603). Philip Sidney was the son of Sir Henry Sidney, Lord Deputy, and thus was intimately aware of the importance of Ireland as training ground for martial masculinity in what otherwise was a Pax Gloriana. Both Cecils oversaw much of the administration of the war effort, and Burghley himself (before his death in 1598) even overturned one of his own earlier reforms in Ireland by allowing again the common issuing of martial-law writs, to which he had previously put a stop on grounds that they promoted wanton violence since those who held them were largely unaccountable for their actions.57 As noted above, aspiring English soldiers wrote to Essex and the Cecils seeking place in the armies sent to prosecute war in Ireland. Even Elizabeth waxed belligerent when it came to Ireland: cautious in Scotland and on the continent, she was relentless in prosecuting the Irish war and hounded her officers there to quell rebellion and punish participants.58 As should be clear, this press for deployment in Ireland was not solely a colonial discourse. It was also an extension of debates over manhood and masculinity in England itself. But whereas one might suspect that such debates merely reflected the neo-chivalric versus service nobility contest in male elite circles, the evidence of shared military concerns argues otherwise. Ireland and its governance had a curious way of distorting metropolitan norms and mentalities regarding proper male conduct, of bringing together parties who otherwise stood apart.

The downside to all this domestic militarism, however, was the threat that it could entice English men away from the civilising restraints that were also deemed fundamental to proper manhood. Again, Irish men were thought savage in their behaviour, largely on account of their uncontrolled and wilful use of physical strength and military might. Yet an English man, armed and trained, and perhaps even wielding a martial-law writ too, was potentially as dangerous to law and order as any Gaelic lord.59 The ability to fight in Ireland, then, brought with it the danger of en masse degeneration of English servitors. This could, and did, play out in a number of ways. Essex is the greatest, but by no means only, example of a chief governor brought down on account of his treasonous flaunting of masculine authority in the queen's second realm. He made his own military policy in spite of express orders otherwise, insisted on appointing his own lieutenants, and abused his ability to create knights in the field, which enraged the queen who thought it a trespass on her powers of social elevation. Further down the governing hierarchy, overmighty regional captains lorded it so heavily over local populations that it was a common complaint in English governmental circles that the Irish could hardly be expected to know justice since the men sent there to dispense it acted little better than beasts.60 Massacres of the surrendered and the innocent, as happened in Rathlin Island (1575) and Smerwick (1580), brought scandal to those men who oversaw them. Even the extralegal masculine justice of the duel, so important to many elite men in spite of its official proscription, lived on in the otherwise ‘savage’ second realm.61 When the Earl of Southampton became embroiled in a dispute that seemed capable of repair only through the test of honour, he and his rival exchanged letters over where to hold the duel. This was under Elizabeth's reign, and she detested duelling. But proper men were to duel regardless of what the queen said and, as the correspondence reveals, they agreed to sail to Ireland to carry out the test.62 Ireland, then, was both theatre of English masculinity and arena for its potential degeneration. In short, English masculinity had an Irish crisis, and it was a crisis critically important in spurring English expansion into the neighbouring island and determining the character of political relations there.63

Part III. Irish masculinity and the reformation of manners

Of course, Irish masculinity had an English crisis, as state centralisation and mass immigration threatened, and eventually toppled, the indigenous social order. The Gaels may not have been monsters whose very sex had to be investigated, and they may have been viewed by English observers as outliers on the continuum of European gender norms, but they nevertheless held to some masculine roles that were quite alien to newcomers. They would have been just as alien to Indian elites, which is to say once again that the lens of masculinity allows us to see distinctions in politicised theatres of English/British expansion and thus break away from the civil/savage binary determined by focus on the colonial ‘other’. Andrew Murphy's study of English literary representations of Ireland was a groundbreaking effort at differentiating between varieties of colonial otherness: the Irish a more ‘proximate’ other, Indians a more distant and exotic.64 But, as noted in the introduction above, that binary still drives much of the historiography. To Murphy's analysis of English-language texts, therefore, we might wish to read for manhood and do so in the Irish-language corpus.65 The obvious and immediate concern for Irish men, as revealed in those sources, was hardly a surprising one: what to do in the face of the Tudor/Stuart state's efforts to co-opt and domesticate the Gaelic warrior caste? This subject has been carefully explored in Sarah McKibben's study of Irish poetry of resistance.66 Over the sixteenth century, Irish bards, the traditional legitimators of lordly status, increasingly decried the lack of fight their patrons showed against creeping consolidation into the Tudor state. Their concerns were thus two: impotence, the result of colonial displacement; and shame, self-inflicted by these men's unwillingness to do what they existed to do – make war.

McKibben's groundbreaking study can be expanded upon, for the problem reached well beyond matters of rulers’ militarism and quietism. Whatever their complaints about Irish lords allowing a feminised Ireland to be raped by invaders, or about their abandoning Gaelic culture like an unwanted child, members of the poetic class were worried about their own masculinity, too. For the state, and its Irish allies, both Gaelic and Old English, worked aggressively to silence the bards, who were the lynchpin in a rival political and social system the removal of which would collapse the whole edifice. The bards knew this; the Tudors knew this – and the struggle between them was a particularly vicious one.67 Consequently, bardic calls to arms and lamentations over the loss of Ireland were always, if at times rather obliquely, also exercises in self-preservation. Much was at stake: these men shared the same legal status as secular lords (who were in fact kings according to vernacular law and tradition) and bishops; they held land, often choice land, at the gift of their noble patrons; they were patriarchs of learning as the poetic class was typically hereditary; they held great political power as councillors and ambassadors, and as checks on lordly excess by means of composing satirical verse against those who strayed outside the norms of good lordship; and many of them oversaw poetic schools.68 Their practical, cultural and symbolic power was as pervasive as it was ancient. And it was a male preserve: there were no female ollúna. The challenge to elite manhood posed by English conquest, then, stretched well beyond concerns over the actions and status of the warrior class.

It also stretched beyond manifestly instrumental aspects of manhood, such as the making of war, to affective gender identity. One of the most striking changes that Anglicisation brought to Irish culture was the elimination of sexual potency and homosocial bonding from the masculine lexicon. As noted above, it is well known that Irish lords were flattered as spouses to the land, which would be fruitful and peaceful when wed to the proper husband. Less well known to those working outside the field of Irish-language literature, but equally important in this culture, was the linking of bards and lords themselves as spouses and lovers. The following late sixteenth-century example is from Aonghus Ó Dálaigh's installation as chief poet to Feilim Ó Tuathail, a chief from a powerful Wicklow sept:

Feilim, son of the son of Art, accept me as chosen bride. Your beauty as spouse is ample in my eyes, O pledge of Irish hands. I take you despite clerical ordinance to be sole spouse: let not either I or you be parted till we be aged by time. I shall have your cattle your gifts; yours are my affection, my art. Who is in a stronger position to spread your reknown? Not you, not I am being deceived.69

One could not be a lord without the imprimatur of a bard, and without having one as councillor. This was a longstanding political reality. Roughly two centuries before Ó Dálaigh's composition, one member of the Uí Bruadaithe family of poets said of an incoming chief of the O'Briens: ‘mé do theann, do chlú, a chleath Chláir’ (‘I am your authority, your reputation, O hero of Clare’). And there was a contract between these two legally equivalent parties, one that was represented in the metaphor of marriage, as Ó Dálaigh expressed to Ó Tuathail:

Let us both join our pact together for the duration of our lives – no short covenant – O slender fist, O noble countenance, full and modest. I shall join with the son of Cian a pact which may not be dissolved. Let our mutual love be therein, let us join our covenant from the heart.70

Fittingly, the privileges enjoyed by the poet were not simply material – such as the granting of land, noted above – but also included the intimate honour of physical proximity: to sit at the lord's elbow or shoulder at drinking time, to sleep next to him after feasting, and to hear his counsel (the Irish words being those for whisper [cogar] and secret [rún] thus highlighting the intimacy of the privilege).71 However, the sexual imagery of bardic eulogistic verse operated in the heteronormal register as well. Vital in the construction of true nobility, as publicly proclaimed by poets such as Ó Dálaigh, was sexual potency. As Damian McManus writes regarding the genre: ‘The chief or hero or celebrand in this poetry is loved in life by all women, including married women, and he is mourned in death by all women, including married women, as a lost lover.’72

The effective collapse of the Gaelic order in the early seventeenth century following English victory in the Nine Years’ War (1594–1603) brought revolutionary change to Irish masculine identity and action. Regarding the latter, the most immediate and obvious effect was the disarming of the Gaelic warrior elite who had to humble themselves before agents of the Crown. That submission, however, set in train a series of interconnected alterations of tremendous cultural and political significance. Primogeniture would now become the social law of the realm: multiple marriages and concubinage were no longer acceptable practices among male elites; Irish lords could not name a bastard to succeed them, and so an heir was to be sired in wedlock or not at all. This also meant that the hope of attaining the lordship of a territory – rising to ‘chief of the name’ – was reserved for sons of the direct line. The more democratic (if not entirely meritocratic) process of succession by election that marked Gaelic politics was now gone, taking with it the prospects for younger sons, cousins and so on, of ever achieving patriarchal lordship.

Perhaps most spectacular, however, was the transformation of the bardic class. From ‘lovers’ of kings and champions of male aristocratic promiscuity, these men went literally and figuratively chaste in the span of roughly a generation, for with the loss of their traditional place in society they joined the ranks of the Counter-Reformation Catholic Church.73 An early seventeenth-century poet, lamenting the ‘passing of the old order’, bewailed the fact that ‘it has befallen Banbha (Ireland) of the fresh soft surface that in Ireland's cool green field one's father's natural calling is not the best.’74 While a general comment on the collapse of traditional ways, this also serves to remind us that bards were no longer ‘fathers’ in the most literal sense. We might take the career of Geoffrey Keating (c.1569–c.1644) as encapsulating this change in Irish masculinity, behaviour and practice. Trained in youth at a bardic school, he pursued his education in theology, earning a doctorate in France. He returned to Ireland where he served the reconstituted, if officially proscribed, Catholic Church and where he penned a series of momentous polemical and historical works. In those works he did address the indigenous nobility, but in ways that would have been unrecognisable to Aonghus Ó Dálaigh. Whereas the poet saw the prosperity of Ireland herself as product of masculine strength and sexuality, Keating blamed Ireland's ill fortunes (that is, colonial and religious subjection) on precisely those same traits. God, he claimed, had allowed Ireland to be overrun by the English as punishment for the sexual indiscretions of Irish lords: ‘Thus I understand that it was in revenge for the adultery of Rory O'Conner, king of Connacht, and the adultery of Dermot MacMurragh, king of Leinster, that God willed the Gaels to be separated from the sovereignty of Ireland and the Foreignors to conquer them.’75 From his Tridentine pulpit he thundered at Irish men, elite and common, to clean up their acts – the fates of their souls and their nation hung in the balance.

Masculinity and political geographies in the British Atlantic world

England, Ireland and the eastern coast of the ‘New World’ were intimately linked in a web of empire whose centre was London. But identifying and disentangling the threads of that web requires continued sensitivity to place and context, and vigilant awareness of the limited, and limiting, distinctions offered by the frame of colonised and coloniser. Gender analysis, and particularly the discourse of masculinity, offers a tool of appropriately fine calibration for expanding upon the present historiography, showing that conflicts over manhood were causal agents in significant historical changes in Elizabethan and early Stuart imperial expansion. In closing with brief consideration of the political implications of this quick circuit of masculinity in the British Atlantic, I return to where I began, with comparison of North America and Ireland. In thinking of these two places and their designation in the English official mind-set, it is important to remember that one was ‘found’ and the other ‘crowned’. Encounter with Indians was encounter that elicited wonder over the bodies of and relations between savage man and woman; governance in the ‘New World’ was more separate amongst natives and newcomers than integrative. By contrast, contact with the Irish was contact with a European society, however peripheral, newly incorporated (as of 1541) into the expanding Tudor state/empire. The demands on governance there included taming a warrior elite, as it did in the Americas. But they also involved much hand-wringing, debate and experimentation over how precisely to establish legitimate rule so as to bring Irish men peacefully into the Anglicised fold, while also letting English men practise the ‘men's business’ of war. Contests over manhood not only provided a vocabulary for interpreting English colonial expansion into Ireland, they also drove that expansion forward with consequences that require our serious attention. Making sure that those men sent to subdue the second realm did not in the process lose touch with their own civility required a unique set of political calculations and innovations, as discussed above, the working out of which would have significant effects across both realms.

Finally, the negotiation of masculinity between native and newcomer in Ireland was not a simple military contest between colonising outsiders and resisting indigenes. Manhood there – as in all places and at all times – was also a relational value among men themselves, and dealing with disenfranchised younger sons and disempowered political counsellors (the bards) posed great political challenges. Moreover, as the indigenous intellectual caste was radically transformed into local vectors of Tridentine hyper-moralism, ruling Ireland invariably embroiled the expanding imperial state in the most intimate politics of home and identity, and did so in a European register not experienced in domestic (English) or overseas (‘American’) governance. England was a colonising power, and the Irish and Indians victims, crudely speaking, of that power. There are numerous ways in which Irish and Indian colonial experiences overlap and resonate – usually in a tragic register – and numerous instances of English denigration of the two peoples. However, placing too great an emphasis on the binary of colonial civility and colonised savagery elides the crucial role played by the contestation and negotiation of differences within, as well as between, the sexes. Gender relations are among the intimate building blocks of all politics, and thus an attention to conflicts over masculinity can help us work from the bottom up – even while using largely top-down sources – as we attempt not only to interrogate colonial relations in their contemporary settings, but also to explore the range of forms that both colonial power and resistance to it can take across time and space.

Acknowledgements

The author wishes to thank Kenneth Gouwens, Laurie Nussdorfer, Valerie McGowan-Doyle and Brían Ó Conchubhair the anonymous reviewers and all the participants at the Histories of Early Modern Masculinities workshop whose input and suggestions have vastly improved this essay.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Brendan Kane

Brendan Kane is Associate Professor of History and Associate Director of the Humanities Institute at the University of Connecticut. Among his recent publications are Nobility and Newcomers in Renaissance Ireland (with Thomas Herron, 2013) and The Politics and Culture of Honour in Britain and Ireland, 1541–1641 (2010).

Notes

^1. Recent examples include Lee, Barbarians and Brothers and Montano, The Roots of English Colonialism.

^2. Perceptive discussion of this point is to be found in Horning, Ireland in the Virginian Sea.

^3. I wish to thank Christopher Clark for suggesting the phrasing “political geographies” and for clarifying my thinking on this.

^4. See, for instance, Todd Reeser's comment that his literary study of moderate masculinity in early-modern Europe was “intended as a contribution to the growing body of work, mostly in British studies, treating early modern masculinities”. Reeser, Moderating Masculinity, 15. More generally see the introductory essay to the present issue.

^5.Fletcher, Gender, Sex, and Subordination, x.

^6. See, for instance, Breitenberg, Anxious Masculinity, and the later and rather different approach to the topic of Wells, Shakespeare on Masculinity.

^7. See for instance Hilda Smith's “‘Acting his own Part’: Gender, the Freeborn Englishman, and the Execution of Charles I,” in her All Men and Both Sexes, 109–34, and Diane Purkiss's brilliant monograph, Literature, Gender and Politics in the English Civil War.

^8. Her comments on the still-underdeveloped state of work on masculinity and politics are instructive: “In much political history until very recently the manliness of formal politics has been [quoting Stefan Dudink, Karen Hagmann, Anna Clark] ‘both omnipresent and invisible’. For the civil war there is much suggestive work by literary scholars including Diane Purkiss, Jerome de Groot and Susan Wiseman on politics and manliness, discussing, in Purkiss's terms, the ‘tentative connections between two arenas hitherto treated separately: masculinity and the public realm of politics’. But social historians … have focused on men in the household, looking at sexuality, violence and the socio-economic rather than the political aspects of manhood, so that the barriers between the social, cultural and political history of early modern England, often remarked on, have restricted the analysis of masculinity and politics.” See Hughes, Gender and the English Revolution, 90. This claim stands in stark contrast to Joan Scott's assessment that, generally speaking, most work on gender has concerned the political sphere. Scott, “Unanswered Questions.”

^9. In concluding her study, for example, Purkiss suggests further comparative study be done on manhood, politics and England's regional cultures in Wales and Cornwall, but not to the other Stuart kingdoms of Ireland and Scotland. Purkiss, Literature, Gender and Politics in the English Civil War, 232. The present article represents a preliminary attempt at extending this question further out into the three kingdoms and British Atlantic.

^10. Here, too, the scholarship is marked by fruitful interdisciplinarity. Examples of historical works broadly interested in empire include Wilson, The Island Race (an explicit study of gender imperial expansion); Colley, Britons (focuses on the development of patriotism in the context of imperial expansion, with attention to its gendered characteristics); Plane, Colonial Intimacies (considers conceptions of marriage in an instance of colonial contact).

^11.Shepard, Meanings of Manhood, 252–3.

^12. Ibid., 8.

^13. Stephen Greenblatt's brief definition of wonder in the context of encounter is applicable here: “Wonder … is the quintessential human response to what De[s]cartes calls a ‘first encounter’ … an instinctive recognition of difference, the sign of heightened attention …[T]he expression of wonder stands for all that cannot be understood, that can scarcely be believed.” Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions, 20.

^14. Recent explorations into the information-gathering of the Tudor/Stuart state include Griffiths, Lost Londons, and Millstone, “Seeing like a Statesman.” Efforts to connect such state activities in England and Ireland include Wood, “The Deep Roots of Albion's Fatal Tree;” Smuts, “Organized Violence in the Elizabethan Monarchical Republic;” Kane, “Ordinary Violence?”

^15.Brown, Good Wives. The trans-oceanic context of emergent race theory was, of course, a common aspect of European imperial expansion in the period. On race theory in the early British Atlantic, which now commands a large and growing literature, exemplary studies include Chaplin, “Natural Philosophy and an Early Racial Idiom” and Morgan, “‘Some Could Suckle over their Shoulder.’”

^16. For the broader European context of such moderation, see Reeser, Moderating Masculinity. This question is still being explored in the English context; see Capp, “‘Jesus Wept’ but did the Englishman?”

^17. The best starting point for work on the English in Ireland is Canny, Making Ireland British.

^18. On liberty, see Palmer “‘That Insolent Liberty.’”

^19.Maginn, “Surrender and Regrant”; Power, A European Frontier Elite; Kane, Politics and Culture of Honour, ch. 1.

^20.McManus, “Good-Looking and Irresistible.”

^21.Purkiss, Literature, Gender and Politics in the English Civil War, 236.

^22. On the monster as “one of the Civil War's aptest symbols of male anxiety”, and more specifically a theme in Milton's writings, see Purkiss, Literature, Gender and Politics in the English Civil War, 163–209; quote p. 164.

^23. This is amply demonstrated in Palmer, “Gender, Violence, and Rebellion.”

^24.Hadfield, Amazons, Savages, and Machiavels, 82.

^25. This paragraph borrows from material addressed more fully in Kane, “Ordinary Violence?”

^26. See for instance Shuger, “Irishmen, Aristocrats, and Other White Barbarians,” 495 in which she attributes this usage to Spenser and Davies; Braddick, State Formation; and, it must be admitted, Kane, The Politics and Culture of Honour, 196.

^27. On Spenser's influence on English views of Irish savagery see Canny, Making Ireland British; on Davies’ goal of bringing the barbarous Irish to civility through implementation of the common law see Orr, “Sir John Davies's Agrarian Law for Ireland.”

^28.Spenser, A View of the Present State of Ireland.

^29. On the development of the Tudor and Stuart archives, see Millstone, “Seeing like a Statesman.”

^30. The classic exposition of the 1570s as the decade in which persuasion was replaced by coercion in English efforts to govern Ireland remains Canny, The Elizabethan Conquest. See too Edwards, “Martial Law.”

^31.Hadfield, Amazons, 297.

^32. Ibid., 263–5 (Peckham); 305, 307 (Smith).

^33.Calendar of State Papers, Ireland, 1571–75, 462. (Hereafter CSPI, 1571–75).

^34. Ibid., 887.

^35. Generally on the concept of internal colonialism in a British/Irish context, see Hechter, Internal Colonialism.

^36. While a crude doodle, it is so unique that it is reproduced in the recently revised and republished CSPI, 1571–75, xxx.

^37.Massing, “Albrecht Durer's Irish Warriors and Peasants.”

^38. This seems to bear out Rory Rapple's point that Ireland was a “political space” in the emerging empire. Rapple, Martial Power and Elizabethan Political Culture.

^39.Traub, “Mapping the Global Body,” 61.

^40.Hadfield, Amazons, 273.

^41. A model study of state processes of mapping colonial territories is Craib, Cartographic Mexico. I thank Antonio Hernandez-Matos for bringing this essential work to my attention.

^42.Ó Buachalla, “James our True King.”

^43. The masculine adventurism of a Drake or Gilbert is, perhaps, obvious. But the connections between that register of manhood and, say, that expressed through the production of scientific knowledge, remain understudied by historians. Historical work on the British Atlantic World – most influentially that of D.B. Quinn, Nicholas Canny and Karen Kupperman – might be revisited with an eye to gender and usefully combined with the methods aimed at recovering the sociological aspects of knowledge production pioneered by historians of science, most famously in Shapin and Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump. A way forward is suggested by Canny, The Upstart Earl.

^44. A study of Irish maps must start with William Smyth, Map-Making, Landscapes and Memory. Here it is proposed to add gender as a further factor in analysis.

^45.Palmer, “Gender, Violence and Rebellion,” 705–11. Though he thinks gender difference is different enough to perhaps be linked to questions of race, and that the language used in relation to Irish, Indians and black Africans in the New World was more similar than I am suggesting.

^46. Old English refers to descendants of earlier Anglo-Norman invaders of Ireland. The extent to which these people took on aspects of Gaelic culture and society, that is, became “gaelicized,” is a matter of some debate. Excellent starting points on the subject include, Canny, The Formation of the Old English Elite, and McGowan-Doyle, The Book of Howth.

^47. This is a common theme expressed in the dialogue by the character Ireneus. For important studies of this genealogical theme see Andrew Hadfield, Edmund Spenser's Irish Experience, 101–8, and Thomas Herron, Spenser'sIrish Work, 172.

^48. Anon., “A Comparison Betwixt the Lives and Actions of Jugurth the Numidian and Hugh Oneale Erle of Tyrone in Ireland,” no pagination, f. 1r.

^49.Raleigh, The discouerie … of Guiana, 71.

^50. I wish to thank Evan Haefeli for drawing this distinction to my attention.

^51. Anonymous, “A Discourse for Ireland,” Calendar of the Carew Manuscripts, v. 4 [151; v. 632, p. 106a; 1594], 107.

^52. Anonymous, “An opinion concerning Contribution towards the Suppressing of Rebels in Ireland.” Ibid., [v. 616, p. 84].

^53.Hammer, The Polarisation of Elizabethan Politics; Gajda, The Earl of Essex.

^54.Maginn, William Cecil; Alford, Burghley.

^55. I specify “this debate” because there were conceptions of manhood current in England at the time that did not include militarism. The patriarchal manhood described in the prescriptive literature, for instance, had no provision for arms. See Shepard, Meanings of Manhood.

^56. Quoted in Hammer, Elizabeth's Wars, 97–8.

^57.Edwards, “Beyond Reform;” Maginn, William Cecil, 203.

^58.Kesselring, The Northern Rebellion. Whereas she became angry over what she deemed wanton violence, such as the massacres at Rathlin Island (1575) and Smerwick (1580), she was even more furious at her commanders’ failures, most famously those of Essex.

^59.Edwards, “Beyond Reform.”

^60. For one example of contemporary comment see Lee, “A Drief Declaration.” Generally on English military captains acting above the law see Rapple, Martial Power.

^61. Generally on the subject see Peltonen, The Duel.

^62. Queens College Oxford Ms 121, ff. 490–2.

^63. Clare Carroll demonstrates how the effeminising threat of Ireland was of concern to English commenters. Thus, English masculinity seems to have faced a number of challenges, posed from differently gendered positions – feminine in the Circe's Cup case, masculine in the above-described instance of too much liberty. Carroll, Circe's Cup. Additionally see Canny, “The Permissive Frontier,” and Palmer, “Gender, Violence, and Rebellion.”

^64.Murphy, But the Irish Sea Betwixt Us. See too the instructive comments on this topic – comments to my mind still not adequately integrated into the historiography – in Andrew Hadfield, “Rocking the Boat”.

^65. The newness of gender analysis also applies to Medieval Irish studies. See the 2013 collection edited by Sheehan and Dooley, Constructing Gender in Medieval Ireland. For the early-modern, see Diane Hall and Elizabeth Malcolm's study, “The Rebels Turkish Tyranny,” which is important both as a study and as a model for future research.

^66.McKibben, Endangered Masculinities. Here, again, it is literary scholars out ahead of the historians on this subject.

^67. The best studies of this subject are Caball, Poets and Politics and Palmer, Language and Conquest.

^68.Breatnach, “The Chief's Poet.”

^69. Ibid., 43.

^70. Ibid., 52.

^71. Ibid., 48.

^72.McManus, “Good-Looking and Irresistible,” 85.

^73. On this point, see Kane, “Domesticating the Counter Reformation.” More generally on Keating and his contexts see Cunningham, Geoffrey Keating.

^74.Bergin, Irish Bardic Poetry, 266.

^75. “Is amhlaidh thuigim gurab i ndíoghaltas adhaltrannais Ruaidhrí mhic Thoirdhealbhaigh Uí Chonchubhair, ríogh Connacht, (agus) adhaltrannais Dhiarmada Mhic Mhurchadha, ríogh Laighean, do dheónuigh Dia Gaoidhil do dhealughadh ré hardflaitheas Éireann, (agus) Gaill do dhéanamh gabháltais orra.” Céitinn (Keating), Trí Bior-ghaoithe an Bháis, 171.