The epigraph presented at the beginning of this chapter reveals Edmund Spenser's image of Man's creation as a divine plan to colonize that ‘waste and empty place’ forfeited by the Fallen Angels, a clear metaphor for Elizabeth's policy of settling Ireland with English Protestants. This book cannot fully satisfy the rising demands for information on southern Ireland's Plantation Period, Elizabethan material culture, or the personal lives of Edmund Spenser and other Renaissance figures. It is intended, rather, to present the views on the topic to a knowledgeable audience in Ireland and Britain, while informing the wider, literary-based readership of the Manchester Spenser series.

This chapter takes a look at the confrontations between the warrior-hero and the femme fatale. It proposes that maybe the most culturally prominent instance of a combined metaphysical and military narrative—the biblical encounter between the Jewish heroine Judith and the Assyrian tyrant Holofernes—hovers intertextually in the background in two ‘warrior plays’ by Shakespeare and Marlowe.

This chapter considers the context of Elizabethan settlement in Ireland by examining the forms of early English colonization: the physical structure of settlements, the activities taking place within them, and the functions these sites fulfilled. The first period (1540–75) witnessed Protector Somerset's aggressive moves in Ireland and Scotland, Mary's unwise entanglement in Hapsburg policy and the subsequent loss of Calais, and Elizabeth's approval of several overly ambitious private colonies. The second phase (1575–1606) witnessed the rebellion and confiscatory defeat of the Earl of Desmond, unsuccessful royally approved attempts to establish a foothold on the North American coast, and the destruction of both the Munster Plantation and the Irish forces of resistance. The final period (1606–40) saw the resettlement of pacified Munster; the flight of the ‘Wild Geese’ earls; the distribution of their lands to London guild companies and the planting there of settlers from Scotland and north England.

This chapter examines Sarah Scott's early fiction and its implications for midcentury political, economic and philanthropic debates about the moral and economic functions of women's work. It argues that, more than any other writer of the mid-century, Scott was committed to moving the working woman from the periphery to the centre of the eighteenth-century novel, to exploring the relationship between labour and gentility, and to asserting that women's work was individually enfranchising and culturally necessary.

This chapter addresses the question of literary ignorance, which is also a question of reading. It shows that reading begins in ignorance, in the search for answers or enlightenment, but that there are some kinds of reader that do not desire knowledge. Aside from being a question of reading, Plato suggests that literary ignorance is also a condition of a certain conception of writing and of authorship. The chapter examines one way to approach literary agnoiology and one problem raised by certain conceptions of the literary. Finally, it also considers a major question of a study of literary ignorance, which is concerned with the question of the knowledge allowed by literary texts.

This chapter considers the representation of figures such as Noah's wife, Eve and the Virgin in relation to the typology that is established through their paradigm stories. Religious and literary texts, like the writings of Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe, and the poems Piers Plowman and The Romance of the Rose, demonstrate the complexity and reflexivity of motherhood in a range of genres that in turn influence such dramas as the later court plays Wisdom and Nature. Focusing upon the mother figure in terms of function rather than subject, the chapter traces the utility of motherhood as a dramatic trope. This richness of meaning ensures that the mother figure is integral to a reformulation of ideology during the process of Reformation. Her importance as an emblem is demonstrated by reference to two polemical plays written during the Reformation and its aftermath, the Protestant Kyng Johan and its Catholic rejoinder, Respublica.

This chapter identifies the shared aspects of the performances of Donne's prose letters, as well as the ways their strategies may be considered typical (of Donne), and describes his letters as remarkable, since they regard both the immediacy and frequency with which they refer to the materiality of language and of letters. This betrays a considerable awareness of modern debates on letter writing. The chapter also focuses on the ways Donne tries to gain secular favour through letters, which are filled with religious concepts.

This chapter focuses on the ignorance of others that can be found in Charles Dickens's Great Expectations and George Eliot's Middlemarch, which are considered to be two of the most fully achieved and most commonly discussed English novels from the mid-nineteenth century. It grounds the discussion on an observation on the self-evident fact that one knows others through the ‘subtler movements of the body’. The chapter reveals that this strategy can be found in these two novels, in which ‘realism’ may be said to be indirectly related to the modern documentary at certain important points. It also aims to identify the different ways hands serve as signifiers of personhood, and studies what this might tell about the saving knowledge of others.

This chapter considers how architectural developments reflected political and social changes in the last generations of Irish autonomy. It analyzes architectural types and techniques associated with the late Elizabethan colonization of Munster, which may be applicable to early modern Ireland in general. The chapter concludes with a study of the tower-house, which was used widely by both Irish aristocracy and English colonial landowners. A key period in Irish history, the reign of Elizabeth began with a medieval, semi-feudal society and ended with a central state authority and displaced populations.