'The Poetics of Property'
Something extraordinary was happening in early modern Ireland, according to Patricia Palmer, a professor of English at Maynooth University in Ireland who is the Burns Visiting Scholar in Irish Studies for the fall semester.
In those years of violence, confiscation, and plantation, Ireland became a laboratory for practices that would later be exported to America, says Palmer—and those practices would transform a relationship with the Earth itself. At the heart of the experiment was the transformation of Irish community-held land into private property and similar subsequent undertakings elsewhere in the world.
Palmer will discuss what she calls “the invention of property,” and the logic of exploitation which flowed from that, at the Burns Scholar Lecture on November 13. “The Poetics of Property: The Ground Possessed and Dispossessed in Early Modern Ireland” will take place at 6 p.m. in the Burns Library Thompson Room, and is free and open to the public (a 5 p.m. reception will precede the lecture).
Palmer, who holds a master’s degree from University College Cork and a doctorate in English literature from the University of Oxford, was a senior lecturer at the University of York and a reader in King’s College London before taking the chair of Renaissance Literature at Maynooth in 2017. She was awarded an Advanced Laureate by the Irish Research Council in 2019. Her publications include Language and Conquest in Early Modern Ireland: English Renaissance Literature and Elizabeth Imperial Expansion, The Severed Head and the Grafted Tongue: Translating Violence in Early Modern Ireland, Early Modern Criticism in a Time of Crisis (co-edited with David Baker), and articles in English Literary Renaissance, Translation Studies, Renaissance Quarterly, and Irish Historical Studies, among others.
At BC, Palmer is teaching the course Reading the Past in an Uncertain Present: The Lessons of Early Modern Ireland and the MACMORRIS Digital Humanities Project. The four-year project—its acronym stands for “Mapping Actors and Contexts: Modelling Research in Renaissance Ireland in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century”—of which she was principal investigator, maps the full range of cultural activity, across languages and ethnic groups, in early modern Ireland.
“[The] ‘invention’ of property transforms our engagement with the land: Rather than seeing it as something more than a human domain, we come to view land as a personal possession, something to be exploited.”
At the heart of Palmer’s scholarship is the depiction of Renaissance-era Ireland as a rich, vibrant place where a number of cultural traditions and languages flourished, rather than the barbarous outpost which it suited its English congress to portray. Among its many qualities, early modern Irish inhabitants regarded land as a place of enchantment and, most importantly, as a community-held resource.
In her Burns Scholar Lecture, Palmer will explore how 16th- and 17th-century English colonists deployed Common Law and ruses like “surrender and re-grant,” introduced by King Henry VIII.
“‘Surrender and re-grant’ helps turn community-held land into the private property of the single individual through common-law title,” said Palmer. “This ‘invention’ of property transforms our engagement with the land: Rather than seeing it as something more than a human domain, we come to view land as a personal possession, something to be exploited.
“This strategy was essentially field-tested in Ireland and used later in places like the Caribbean and North America, and became a staple of the modern state,” she added. “We’ve seen the consequences of this land-as-property mindset play out in crises of socioeconomic equality and biodiversity. What I want to explore in the lecture is whether recovering the older—such as the pre-colonization Gaelic—ways of engaging with the land as a place of enchantment rather than possession has anything to say to the present.”
During her stint as Burns Scholar, Palmer has been utilizing the resources of Burns Library in continuing to work on a book project that seeks to uncover worldviews pushed out of history by conquest. Bardic poetry, for example, offers ways of thinking about the land as nature, Palmer said, that speak with new urgency amid a climate crisis that arises directly from actions and ideologies pioneered in early modern colonial laboratories, like Ireland.
A collaboration between the Irish Studies Program and University Libraries, the Burns Scholar program brings outstanding academics, writers, journalists, librarians, and other notable figures to the University to teach courses, offer public lectures, and work with the resources of the Burns Library in their ongoing research, writing, and creative endeavors related to Irish history, art, and culture.