LAND PRACTICES: ENGLISH SETTLERS IN IRISH LANDSCAPES

The imposition of new agrarian and land management practices had profound consequences for both the environment of Ireland and those who inhabited it. These changes impacted how the landscape looked, how it was mapped, how it was named, and how key resources were accessed and distributed: “underpinning all these changes was a shift in the ownership of land and the introduction of settlers, under both formal plantation schemes, and informal colonization.”Footnote ⁹ As Eugene Costello argues, however, little scholarship exists on the transformation of the physical landscape—much as physical place is absent from many of the English-language sources on Ireland.Footnote ¹⁰ As will become clear, Southwell’s reading of agricultural practices in the Bible is meshed with conventional language used to discuss agrarian reform in the English context. In England, however, the displacement of people by animals has a different valence to the deep antipathy to seasonal pastoralism found in English attitudes to traditional Irish practices, even as those same settlers used it and profited from it.Footnote ¹¹ Edmund Spenser’s (1552/53–99) View of the Present State of Ireland (printed 1633), for example, aligns booleying (the seasonal movement of cattle to higher pastures) with the practice of the Scythians, and identifies it as a key way that the Irish evade law and obedience:

Despite entrenched ideological opposition to such practices, the undertaker Sir Thomas Phillips (ca. 1560–1636) registered astonishment at the profusion of cattle and the heavy production of barley and oats in Ulster, which testifies to the sustainability of the practice of creaghting or booleying.Footnote ¹³ Sir Arthur Chichester (1563–1625), however, argued for the outlawing of this practice on the grounds that it promoted idleness, a common framing of seasonal mobility.Footnote ¹⁴ Moral objection to Irish inheritance laws is a staple of Elizabethan and Jacobean reform literature, as Spenser’s View indicates, alleging that these laws militate against cultivation.Footnote ¹⁵ Lifetime interest is seen to be inimical to the development of agriculture as well as to proper civic obedience and order, as John Dymmok argues:

The building of walls, hedges, and permanent structures was a highly visible way of marking the transition to tillage and enclosure from pastoralism, but it was also a materialization of an ethical position with regard to proper land use, which was frequently also a providential position. As Parr Lane (fl. 1621) writes in his Character of the Irish (1608–09), the “malicious” nature of the Irish is evident in their (mis)use of land and resources:

Eugene Costello asserts that such depictions are fundamental to “Tudor propaganda about Ireland,” and that reform literature purposely overlooked or distorted native land use as a deliberate strategy: “with the native population (apparently) making such inefficient use of the country’s fertile soils, successive Tudor and Stuart administrations felt they had an important justification for completing the conquest of Ireland and bringing settlers over to instigate change.”Footnote ¹⁸

It is this form of colonial distortion that I argue shapes Southwell’s refraction of the Irish context in her writing. An environmental understanding of a transition to tillage, the use of new forms of enclosure, and the disruption of traditional seasonal movements of people and animals (including loss of traditional means of raising crops) “do[es] not align with concepts found in the sources,” which tend to view the natural world through a providential and extractive lens, even as the Irish agrarian economy, in common with Europe more widely, shifted toward a market-focused model of production.Footnote ¹⁹ Which concepts of landscape, resources, and environment, then, enable the systematic occlusion or erasure of what was physically present in the local landscapes of seventeenth-century County Cork in their representations by English observers? What ideas give rise to the displacement of these landscapes by a rhetorically constructed idea of land and land use? How might readers understand Southwell’s relationship to Ireland when her references to the materiality of the landscape are scant and largely framed not by observation of the material world and landscape but by scriptural allusion?Footnote ²⁰ And how do Southwell’s poems and the networks they represent complicate our view of the planter imaginary in early modern Ireland?

SOUTHWELL’S IRISH NETWORKS: LAND, LAW, AND RELIGION

Evan Bourke, in his recent article on Spenser’s Irish networks, states that Southwell and Spenser are “rarely considered within the Irish contexts in which they produced their poetry.” Bourke also notes less obvious poets and writers in Spenser’s “community,” whose work might enhance and extend our understanding of early modern Ireland beyond Spenser’s texts.Footnote ²¹ While there is now a considerable body of scholarship on Spenser in/and Ireland, this dimension is almost wholly lacking for other anglophone poets writing in—opposed to about—Ireland in the first half of the seventeenth century.Footnote ²² Ireland remained central to Southwell’s self-realization, and to the identity of her family—a question largely neglected in the extant scholarship, which has looked for specific evidence of, for example, topographical features, and found them lacking, rather than engaging more widely with the rhetorical work connected with the ideology and practice of plantation.Footnote ²³

The Southwells (both Anne’s husband Thomas, and his brother Anthony) were involved in the effort to consolidate English control of Munster after the Nine Years’ War. Rather than simply owning and cultivating land (important though that was), this second phase of the Munster plantation was an attempt to embed English culture, language, and land use—and, specifically, to cultivate a Calvinist form of Protestantism.Footnote ²⁴ This was less a matter of regulation and rather more a question of conscience and private practice, underpinned by informal textual networks and social relations. In the absence of rigorous conformity at the parish level, this minority group (outnumbered in terms of faith, allegiance, and language) inevitably turned to textual means to assert their specific identity—which was focused on allegiance to the Crown, with an orientation toward the lands they occupied and attempted to reform. The progress of religious reform was often more imagined than real, unsupported as it was by any canonical underpinning at parish level—the 1615 Articles of Religion, for example, were not enforced until the 1630s.Footnote ²⁵ Textual means included the circulation of books and manuscripts as well as sermon attendance; Anne Southwell was deeply familiar with the repetitive, tropological language of the numerous reform tracts on Ireland—many of which circulated in manuscript; Spenser’s View, for example, was only printed by James Ware (1594–1666) in his Historie of Ireland in 1633.Footnote ²⁶ Reform, then, for families like the Southwells, was a question of law, land, and religion, but in the absence of obvious, concrete success, this remained a matter of imagination and projection into an abstract future, much as life on earth for radical Protestants was a mere preparatory shadow of the life to come.

Lady Anne Southwell spent most of her adult life in Ireland, living with her husband, Sir Thomas Southwell (ca. 1575–1626), in County Cork, leasing the castle of Poulnalong at Shippool on the river Bandon, roughly equidistant between the plantation town of Bandon upriver and the strategic port of Kinsale downriver. Thomas and Anne married in London in 1594; Thomas appears to have been active in Ireland in the late 1590s, and Anne joined him in County Cork at the start of the reign of James I.Footnote ²⁷ Thomas and Anne had two surviving daughters.Footnote ²⁸ The eldest, Elizabeth (ca. 1590–after 1642), married Sir John Dowdall (fl. 1623) of County Limerick, and wrote two separate accounts of her effort to defend Kilfinny Castle during the early 1640s.Footnote ²⁹ Crucial to the Irish networks represented in the Folger miscellany is the Council of Munster, the primary instrument for the imposition of Crown policies in the province, of which both Thomas Southwell and John Dowdall were members; it is likely that the miscellany was constructed precisely to showcase these connections.Footnote ³⁰ These links suggest a tightly networked community around Bandon and Kinsale, reaching north into Kilmallock, County Limerick, and into Limerick city, based on membership of and interactions with the Council of Munster. The Council Book of the Province of Munster provides ample evidence of the key concerns of the planter class: the imposition of law, and the appropriate use of land. In 1617, for example, the Council ordered leaseholders to provide visible boundaries to their land:

The Council Book provides valuable evidence of Southwell’s network. For example, Bernard Adam, bishop of Limerick and Kilfenora (1566–1626), the addressee of Southwell’s verse epistle playing on his surname, “Adam, first preist, first Prophet and first King” was also a member of the Council of Munster.Footnote ³² Adam was appointed in the aftermath of the Nine Years’ War to give the Church of Ireland pastoral and missionary weight, having been charged by Robert Cecil, Earl of Salisbury (1563–1612) and Sir Henry Brouncker (ca. 1550–1607) with enforcing religious conformity.Footnote ³³ Adam wrote to Cecil in April 1611, asserting that in “this tranquilled Iland…there is nothinge greatly awry, if Religion were right.”Footnote ³⁴ Brouncker was also the patron of Parr Lane, whose poem “News from the Holy Ile” echoes Southwell’s; Lane also sat on the Council of Munster.Footnote ³⁵ Finally, there are poems in the Folger manuscript by Sir Walter Ralegh (1551–1618; a neighbor both in Devon and Cork) and by Francis Quarles (1592–1644), who was secretary to James Ussher, archbishop of Armagh, from 1626 to 1630.

Most critical accounts present evidence relating to Southwell’s life in Ireland as being scanty and brief, and her engagement with Irish matters as opaque and vague.Footnote ³⁶ Yet, as Marie-Louise Coolahan writes, Anne Southwell left behind her “an expanding dynasty of settlers.”Footnote ³⁷ But it was not only Anne’s marital family whose fortunes were entwined with the Reformation of Munster. Her brother, Edward Harris (1575–1636), was the chief justice on the Council of Munster, second in status only to the Lord President himself; he held this position from 1608 to 1624, the period during which much of Anne’s poetry was likely written.Footnote ³⁸ He was also MP for Clonakilty in the 1613 Irish Parliament.Footnote ³⁹ Harris had been expelled from the Middle Temple for nonconformity, and his appointment in Munster was no doubt facilitated by his Calvinism. Coolahan positions Southwell’s poems within the framework of a fragile, fledging Protestant sociability, which, she argues, enabled “the establishment of new social connections” where “scribal circulation was a means of…consolidating a minority community, often geographically scattered and beleaguered.”Footnote ⁴⁰ This, I suggest, extends beyond Southwell’s social verse to her scriptural paraphrases on the decalogue.Footnote ⁴¹ The use of scriptural language to mediate power relationships within the local context was common to many of the figures in Southwell’s network, and to the texts that circulated within it. Scriptural analogy was a key way to mediate political debate and provide authorization for a range of positions. Bernard Adam, for example, wrote several letters containing the violent anti-Catholic and anti-Irish rhetoric that typifies English commentary on the question of Ireland; his letters also use the scriptural imaginary with regard to landscape and the highly allusive style, dependent on metaphor, parallelism, and analogy, that feature notably in Southwell’s poetics. Adam writes:

Such rhetoric is a conventional feature of many key early modern texts on Ireland, and Southwell’s poetry contains echoes of several of these. The texts and people in her network were closely allied with the larger project of the transformation of the landscape—and thus the culture, economy, and religion—of early modern Ireland.Footnote ⁴³

LANDSCAPE AND PROVIDENCE

Alexandra Walsham suggests in The Reformation of the Landscape that renewed critical attention to ideas of landscape mean that it is possible to position landscape as both generative of symbolic meaning and generated by the imposition of conceptual categories that originate elsewhere. She writes:

One crucial conceptual category draws on scriptural examples and metaphors—parables rooted in agricultural correlatives were easily translated to explicate the rural environments of the early modern period, and people’s relationships to them. Anne Southwell’s use of the word landscape in her poetry demonstrates the way she treats the Irish landscape not as an object to be represented, but as a “porous surface,” a form of vacancy that can then be scripted in terms of her own preoccupations.Footnote ⁴⁵ The first is in her “Elegie…to the Countesse of London Derrye”; her subject’s title references the plantation of Ulster and the practice of renaming places and topographical features. The poem playfully imagines the progress of Cicely Ridgeway’s (1562–1628) soul after her death, and the word landscape is used to convey scopic distance as Ridgeway’s soul is imagined to be looking back at earth and at the poet:

Here “landskipp” is not a vista, or even a material object; rather, it is a way of looking, a perspective, less a description of what is there than a reflection of the viewer and her preoccupations. The second usage of the word landscape occurs in her verse meditation on the fourth commandment. Reflecting on how female virtues are conventionally traduced, she breaks off to note that the pursuit of argument is futile:

Again here, “landskip witt” suggests a perspective that bends the evidence to fit an existing position or prejudice—the opposite of the separation of observer and observed that later ideas of landscape imply.

Landscape was the repository of complex and conflicting meanings, which could be (in the eyes of English administrators, clerics, and planters) “key signifiers of the civility that was certain to save Ireland and the Irish from themselves.”Footnote ⁴⁸ Montaño asserts that it is a short conceptual step from viewing the landscape as representing certain ideals of conduct and identity to the deployment of agricultural metaphors as a way to describe the process of moral, religious, and ethical reform.Footnote ⁴⁹ Such an approach depended on the “revival of classical ideas about cultivation and land,” and on the recycling of key tropes from Giraldus Cambrensis (and Holinshed) in order to concretize Irish lack of civility in the appearance and use of landscapes, and, more specifically, in the failure to leverage their resources extractively for the purpose of trading commodities.Footnote ⁵⁰ Work by Sarah McKibben and others demonstrates that such positions represent both tropological readings of landscape and directions for colonial practice, which depend on representing existing land practices—notably pastoralism—as indicative of poor governance, ignorance, and lack of discipline, concatenated with core cultural differences relating to ownership, succession, governance, and religious practice.Footnote ⁵¹

Just as important in the construction of colonial landscapes as potential resource is the use of scripture. Biblical precedent provides a typological foreshadowing and justification for wholesale changes in land ownership and use—not just in Ireland. As the work of Ellen Davis, Frances Dolan, and others illustrates, the Bible is full of resonant examples of the alliance between virtue, godliness, and prudent use of God’s providence, expressed through prevalent images of plenty and dearth, corn, oil, honey and wine, harvest and crop failure.Footnote ⁵² Alongside classical topoi, the Bible provided models for thinking about land and its use that carried divine sanction and incontrovertible authority. As James E. McWilliams argues, colonial expansion “relied upon rhetorical constructions of nature to imbue unfamiliar ecosystems with self-serving expectations”— constructions that, he argues, draw not so much from observation but from scriptural models and parables.Footnote ⁵³

Southwell mediates the contested landscape and complex politics of early seventeenth-century Munster by providing a scriptural overlay that effectively erases the Irish language, place-names (either transliterated or replaced), and specific, nuanced contestations around law, religion, economy, and land use. She deploys providential thinking rooted in biblical topoi, analogies, and typologies; scripture repurposed into poetry becomes the lens through which landscape is seen, and Calvinist theology based on predestination and providence is the interpretive frame by which meaning is ascribed. The idea that the land is provided for the benefit of those who use it properly (i.e., using tillage and other fixed forms of agriculture rooted in a concept of private ownership, rather than commonage or collective practices) is central to Southwell’s thought, as it was to the thinking of many early modern planters, traders, and colonists, even—or especially—where this required ignoring or obliterating existing land practices.Footnote ⁵⁴ In this chain of associations, then, landscape is super-charged with moral, theological, and ethical meaning, with notions of order and rebellion being realized in the topographical disposition and management of the land. The strategic depiction of Ireland as empty and waste was the necessary prerequisite for what Lupton terms “geographic transformation.”Footnote ⁵⁵ Luke Gernon (ca. 1580–ca. 1672) describes Ireland as a woman who “hath the greene sicknes for want of occupying…she is not embraced, she is not hedged and diched; there is noo quicksett putt into her.”Footnote ⁵⁶ Scriptural precedent and analogy are strategically used to represent the ideal relationship of settler to land.

The idea that the landscape is provided by God for judicious use by true believers is repeatedly bolstered by recourse to scriptural precedent, whereby God’s chosen people are predestined to fulfil the proleptic typologies of the Old Testament. For Southwell, this is articulated using the agricultural metaphors of the Bible. In Precept 4 (“Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy”), for example, in a verse in an extended passage about the New Jerusalem and the new covenant for the faithful “raysed” up in Christ, she writes:

Here the vine, in the extended metaphor of John 15, represents the evangelism of the apostles, who are “of nature dry and fit for nothing but the fire,” and by extension the fruitless planting of the word, much as the efforts to impose Reformed religion in the early years of the seventeenth century were partial and fragmentary at best.

As Roya Biggie has recently argued, the language of botanical transplantation is intertwined with the complex meanings of cultivation as a form of cultural coercion: “botanical metaphor…occludes the inherent terror of forcible displacement, imagining instead burgeoning plants and the horticulturalist’s caring hand.”Footnote ⁵⁸ Biggie’s article does not address the early modern homology of planting and religion, but the stakes are intensified when the “horticulturalist’s caring hand” is that of God and his providence; the vine is allegorical (but will not grow in Irish soil), and will “prove barren” without adequate cultivation, despite “soe good a soyle” and the divine provision of optimum conditions, “nor sunne nor rayne nor season wanted.” If the vine represents the church (and for Southwell, this is the Reformed church), then her discourse here references the tensions over what constitutes receptive soil—for colonizers, the soil is ideal for the flourishing of the church, but for native peoples, the same soil is resistant to this form of planting.Footnote ⁵⁹ In this stanza, Southwell moves between New Testament and Old as she articulates the sense of despair and frustration common to the New English Protestant community, interweaving a reference to Hosea 8, a chapter about the destruction of Israel and Judah on account of idolatry: “they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind: it hath no stalk: the bud shall bring forth no meal: if so be it brought forth, the strangers shall devour it.” This is accompanied in the Geneva Bible by a note that reads: “showing that their religion hath but a show, and in itself is but vanity.” Given Southwell’s powerfully anti-Catholic rhetoric, and the distinctly apocalyptic cast of her reading, the allusion to idolatry and vanity can be read as both local and international.

In Southwell’s poems, the world of nature is a divine script, whose meanings the reader must decode with the aid of biblical topoi and commentaries used analogically and typologically. In her paraphrase of the fifth commandment, Southwell writes:

This passage refers to God’s cursing of the ground after the fall of Adam and Eve (Genesis 3:18), but pledges redemption through Christ via the typology of God’s promise to the Israelites (Exodus 13:5); here, landscape is as much a spiritual resource as a material one. The idea of Canaan as the promised land is found in some reform tracts, as Ralph Loeber has suggested.Footnote ⁶¹ In Certayne Notes, written around 1608, the anonymous author explicitly connects Ireland to the earliest biblical precedent:

Stephen Jerome (ca. 1588–ca. 1650), chaplain to the Richard Boyle, Earl of Cork (1566–1643), similarly uses biblical precedent when explaining the dispersal of English settlers in Ireland in his text celebrating the accession of Charles I (1600–49):

Here spiritual superiority derives precisely from minority status alongside the familiar language of “plant[ing]” and “seed,” with the appropriative claim inherent in Jerome’s repeated and insistent use of the phrase “our Ireland”—this is a statement of identity and power, not an assertion of solidarity.

For Southwell, landscape and natural resources are at the heart of the material evidence for God’s providence. In her version of the first commandment, Southwell notes that

The preceding stanza equates trust in God with agricultural bounty: “florish like the spring …/ increase in corne, wyne, oyle …/ thy store augmenting, like a swelling tyde,” drawing on Psalm 92:12, with its providential focus on the “felicity of the just.”Footnote ⁶⁵ Alongside these stanzas is written “A note of gods providence freewill and predestenation taken out of Saynt Augusten.”Footnote ⁶⁶ Her reading of Augustine perhaps explains the extent to which Southwell seeks analogies in the natural world to understand spiritual conflicts and transformations, and interprets these as evidence of the workings of God’s will; this reading includes landscape and planting as a primal space upon which these conflicts are written. Her language draws heavily on biblical sources, but often indirectly or in distantly allusive ways, in a mode that might be described more accurately as scripturesque: vain delights are “drops of honey smerd with gall”; the elements “never…derogate” from the fifth commandment.Footnote ⁶⁷ The language of the Bible is, for Southwell, rhetorically and conceptually constitutive. The physical world—and by extension the landscape—is a resource to be mined for meaning and for evidence of divine works, just as it is a material resource. Southwell’s verse epistle to Bernard Adam, bishop of Limerick, asserts the power of faith, hope, and love to dispel sin and death, but does so in highly concrete terms:

That Ireland is repeatedly represented in early modern treatises as damp, watery, and subject to vapors is hard to ignore.Footnote ⁶⁹ The idea of fog is associated with error, lack of wisdom, and a failure of faith: “with mediocritye assist my flight / as free from fogges, as farre from winges to light.”Footnote ⁷⁰ Dampness pervades Southwell’s poetry—she argues that the ear’s “tunnel shape” makes it particularly susceptible to Satan’s “breathing breathlesse death”; the ear is “broad to receave and narrow to retayne, / th’infestiouse dampe, that poisond every vayne.”Footnote ⁷¹ When Southwell rouses her soul to action, to “cast of this stupid lethargie of sense,” and “goe to gods house,” this is contrasted with being “bogged in diffidence”—where here being “sunk and entangled in a bog or quagmire” is used figuratively.Footnote ⁷²

By contrast, reform tracts on Ireland often use the image of the bog as a correlative for ignorance and apostasy.Footnote ⁷³ Parr Lane, in his poem “Newes from the Holy Ile,” writes “whoo thinkes fit that reformacions hand / should draine the boggs that conquer thus this land,” conjoining a topographical feature with spiritual status.Footnote ⁷⁴ A few stanzas later, Southwell develops her meditation on not taking the Lord’s name in vain to condemn Catholic worship: “& now on pilgrimages they must runne / & strip & whipp & fast & goe to masse,” but ultimately distances herself from the “fopperyes” of “this land” (the rapid parataxis and heaped-up verbs point to heightened emotional investment), asserting that she will not engage in hypocritical speech for gain: “nor will I ever seeke a bad mans grace / Or call him sweete whose breath is like a fogge, / or prayse his shape, that’s bellyed like a bogge.”Footnote ⁷⁵ In the same precept, Southwell explains how her reading has led her to knowledge of “the religions of all landes”:

Her current situation is contrasted with “that happy land / where I was borne,”Footnote ⁷⁷ but this concentration of vocabulary that is powerfully coded in the Irish context suggests a particular application of her arguments to her local situation. The use of “foggye mantle” as a metaphorical articulation of ignorance finds powerful echoes in the kinds of polemical writings that Southwell’s kin and social network were sending back to the Crown and Privy Council. A mantle, for example, is a type of blanket worn as an over-cloak, particularly associated with Scotland and Ireland in the early modern period; it was equated with deceit and rebellion. Spenser’s Irenius describes the functions of the mantle as “a fitt howse for an outlawe a mete bedd for a Rebell and an Apte Cloke for a thefe.”Footnote ⁷⁸ These seemingly minor points of common usage point to the key elements of the reform agenda: religion, law, and land use indexed via the visual appearance of landscapes, and their resource potential if appropriately managed.

SOUTHWELL’S SCRIPTURAL LANDSCAPES

Kevin Killeen, in a chapter on Southwell’s decalogue poems, argues that “biblical thinking mapped the typic, biblical world to Munster, to Ireland, to London, but it did not need to speak to a particular local circumstance to be politically viable in this fashion.”Footnote ⁷⁹ In Southwell’s poem on the third commandment, she writes:

The traditional practice of female lament—the mná caointe—is critically invoked through the prism of anti-Catholicism. Southwell here folds her observation of keening into her own providential understanding, eliding Gaelic culture with Catholicism. Keening had no formal connection with Catholic ritual—and, indeed, the Catholic Church made repeated efforts to outlaw the practice.Footnote ⁸¹ In the next stanza (42) she states, prayer-like, “Lord yf it bee thy will, give them more light / & cutt of theyr seducer from his throane.”Footnote ⁸² The mobilization of scriptural and classical precedent to explicate the abject horror of Catholicism is symptomatic of the binary positioning of Protestantism and Catholicism in early modern culture in general, but it carries a specific weight in the Irish context. Stanza 42 invokes the ten horns of the Book of Revelation:

The verse alluded to here is Revelation 17:3: “so he carried me away into the wilderness in the Spirit, and I saw a woman sit upon a scarlet colored beast, full of names of blasphemy, which had seven heads, and ten horns.” The idea of spiritual wilderness that frames Southwell’s lines is a powerful allegorical landscape, and this specific verse is clearly appropriated for anti-Catholic propaganda, here and more broadly. The Geneva Bible commentary, for example, notes that this chapter expounds “the type of Babylon,” and that “this is full of names of blasphemy,” wholly relevant to a verse exposition of the third commandment.

Southwell’s poems glance at key debates and crises in the Church of Ireland in the early seventeenth century, and share in the apocalyptic orientation of early modern Protestantism in Ireland.Footnote ⁸⁴ Her interest in the Old Testament, in particular, aligns her decalogue poetry with efforts to interpret contemporary events in Ireland through the prism of apocalyptic thought, as Alan Ford explains:

Southwell’s decalogue poems are indebted to this model of typological and analogical thought, drawing extensively on models from the Old Testament and ranging beyond her direct prompts in the book of Exodus. It is this morally and ethically charged landscape that Southwell sees as her immediate environment. Her thinking about the natural world is entirely consonant with the providential and extractive models promulgated by those in her immediate social circles and in the wider community of Irish Protestants. Her framing is aligned with a disconnect between ideology, on the one hand, and use and lived experience, on the other—namely, the rhetorical emptying of a landscape that was replete with people, language, animals, and meaning. Southwell depends on a common core of texts and discourses circulating in Jacobean Ireland; sometimes her embeddedness in discursive rhetorics on Ireland is evident from powerfully coded key words (foggy; bog/boggy; mantle); elsewhere, this alludes to specific questions or controversies. In Precept 4, she makes specific reference to the crisis in the Church of Ireland over suitable clergy, contrasting the lack of bishops with the relative triviality of the vestarian controversy: “at home a surpless makes them sitt & mourne / but heere five churchmens seates serves not one turne.”Footnote ⁸⁶ Southwell’s opposition of “at home” and “here” is a rare acknowledgement of her sense of displacement.

Displacement is managed in the poems by attending to the moral imperatives of reform, viewed through the colonial lens. Much as the believer must attend to the state of her soul, the planter must attend to the state of the land, improving it and tending it for future good and benefit. These are, Southwell suggests, each analogous to the other. In Precept 3 (“Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord in vain”), Southwell writes:

The positioning of this commentary within the powerfully coded framework of hearing the word, on the one hand, and that of the relationship between faith and works, on the other, is particularly pointed.Footnote ⁸⁸ Implicitly, it alludes to the allegedly lax practices of English planters, often elided with social status: “the meaner sort of the English who have resided there any time are the worst part of the Venom that the Country yields, for being not of the best when they came over, they grew worse and worse etc.”Footnote ⁸⁹ In Southwell’s poem, the word foxtail points in multiple directions—it is the sign of a fool or jester; it is an edible plant with soft spikes of flowers; and it refers finally to the Book of Judges, where Samson attached torches to the tails of foxes and as they ran they set all alight, thus destroying the fields of the Philistines, burning “both the ricks and the standing corn” (15:4–5)—“Or, that which was reaped and gathered,” as the Geneva commentary explains. Crop destruction was a primary tool of colonial control in seventeenth-century Munster, both by the English and by the Gaelic lords.

In a further example of what Kevin Killeen describes as the “polylayering of the scriptural,” in Precept 3 Southwell writes:

“This” glances back to the previous stanza with its stress on “oaths” and the “mark of blasphemy”; Southwell racializes the category of the ungodly, and excludes both Catholics and Muslims from the contract with God implied by the commandments. This list does not distinguish between confession, nation, and ethnicity. The category of the ungodly is mobilized centrally in Southwell’s project of building Christian identity. The reference to “chaffe & stuble” seems straightforward enough in its implication that these non-Protestant groups are what is left behind when the wheat is winnowed—an agricultural metaphor for the doctrine of predestination.

But an analysis of the scriptural verses to which Southwell refers reinforces the analogy to the imperative to make good use of land. The term chaff and stubble occurs three times in the 1599 Geneva Bible (Job 21:18, Isaiah 5:24, and Isaiah 33:11). In Job 21, it relates to the property of the wicked that “the storm carrieth away.” In Isaiah 5, the phrase occurs in the context of “the similitude of the vine” by which “he describeth the state of the people”—their avarice, drunkenness, and captivity. The language here is specifically about agriculture gone awry; the “fruitful hill” produces “wild grapes” (Isaiah 5:1–2)—a failure of not only crop cultivation but also spiritual transplantation. The Geneva commentary interprets this narrative as an allegory of the church: “meaning, that he had planted the Church in a place most plentiful and abundant.” The phrase chaff and stubble is associated in early modern texts with precisely the religious conflict that creates the binary around which other oppositions (race; status; language) are structured. For example, in Henry Airay’s (ca. 1560–1616) sermon on Philippians, he asserts:

The reference is also used in a strident call for the reform of religion in Wales by the controversialist John Penry (1562/63–93), where opponents are equated with the ungodly:

This phrase is tossed back and forth in controversies relating to the equation of the antichrist with the Catholic Church, but it is also used in the context of Ireland. A pamphlet called The Overthrow of an Irish Rebel, written in response to the conflict between George Paulet (d. 1608) as governor of Derry and Sir Cahir O’Doherty (Ó Dochartaigh, 1587–1608) and printed in 1608.Footnote ⁹³ This profoundly anti-Irish text wholly distorts the complex relationships at play in Derry and its hinterlands (including Tory Island and the Inishowen peninsula), relationships that Paulet was wholly ill-equipped to manage. When writing of the overpowering of the Irish forces gathered by O’Doherty, this same language of vengeful destruction and dispersal is used:

These usages of the scriptural phrase immediately evoke ideas of loss, decay, and violence. More broadly, the application of the text points to the failure of those who are to tend the church and the vineyard’s destruction: “I will lay it waste: it shall not be cut, nor dug, but briers and thorns shall grow up” (Isaiah 5:6). This finds a direct echo in Southwell’s poem following several stanzas about the establishment of the true church (“A holy temple & a holy people / that should noe more bee bondslaves unto sinne”), “a new Jerusalem”:Footnote ⁹⁵

The laying waste of the vineyard leads to exile and famine—and this framing of the impacts of war and mismanagement is familiar from reform literature on early modern Ireland. Southwell’s logic in being drawn to this scriptural place is driven by Isaiah 5:24’s reference to blasphemy (taking the Lord’s name in vain): “as the flame of fire devoureth the stubble, and as the chaff is consumed of the flame: so their root shall be a rottenness, and their bud shall rise up like dust, because they have cast off the Law of the Lord of hosts, and contemned the word of the Holy one of Israel.” Blasphemers then, bring environmental destruction; the ungodly are marked by their agricultural failure. In the Geneva commentary on Isaiah 33:11, the use of the phrase chaff and stubble is connected specifically to ideas of ownership, conflict, and destruction: “This is spoken against the enemies, who thought all was their own: but he showeth that their enterprise shall be in vain, and that the fire which they had kindled for others, should consume them.”

A final example will demonstrate the ways in which Southwell’s deployment of scriptural analogy links her to a network of New English administrators and their texts. In Precept 4, Southwell’s ire turns toward schism and poor church governance, noting that incompetent or absent clergy actively damage the effort to bring Ireland over to the side of the godly: “call you these pastors, who rude pastorals / are nodes sett to the sacred springes downefall.”Footnote ⁹⁷ Complaints about corrupt, ignorant, and absent clergy are a key element of reform literature.Footnote ⁹⁸ Alluding the parable of the sower in Matthew 13, Southwell argues for the need to reform religion. The antithetical relationship between the sowers of wheat (the godly) and the neglectful and harmful sowers of tares (vetch, or, generically, weeds) was variously interpreted to delineate the relationship between the godly and the ungodly (those predestined and those not; heretics within the church; the true church and the false church). Southwell writes:

This parable was the subject of extensive commentary, but rather than interpreting it as a model for toleration, Southwell calls upon God to send “faithfull laborers” to extirpate nonbelievers, the laborers here being both divine proxies but also metaphorical and literal farmers of the land. Calvin makes it clear that in the application of the parable the “field” is the church, and the verse refers to the failures of conversion and preaching in his commentary on verse 36:Footnote ¹⁰⁰

The language of sowing and reaping points to the providential evidence of agrarian reform in the form of tillage, but also to efforts at religious conversion.

Several texts—all printed in Dublin in the 1620s—circulating within Southwell’s network return to this parable in the context of the need to establish true religion in Ireland. George Andrewe (or Andrews, ca. 1575–1648), Dean of Limerick, preached four sermons in the summer of 1624, two in Limerick, the second in the presence of Donough O’Brien, Earl of Thomond (d. 1624), and Southwell’s brother, Edward Harris.Footnote ¹⁰² Andrewe applies the parable of the wheat and the tares directly to the position of the church in Ireland, and to the role of planters in upholding true religion in parallel to effective land use:

Christopher Hampton (1552–1625), James Ussher, Stephen Jerome, and Christopher Sibthorpe (d. 1632/23) all cite this parable in the service of arguments for the establishment of the true church:Footnote ¹⁰⁴

In Parr Lane’s poem “Newes from the Holy Ile,” the parable (his language mingles the chaff of the Old Testament with the cockle/tares of the New) is interpreted specifically in terms of the malign influence of Satan (and, for Lane, this means Catholics) on godliness:

Lane’s language alludes to many of the same sources and tropes as Southwell, but also to the agricultural metaphors of separation and improvement that also represent hierarchical relationships with land, language, and religion in the overdetermined discourses of colonialism in early modern Ireland.