The research behind Making Room in History<\/em> \u00a0is published in my dissertation, “No Room in History”: Genre and Identity in British and Irish National Histories, 1541\u20131691<\/em>, and in two articles, “The Poetics and Politics of Legend: Geoffrey Keating\u2019s Foras Feasa ar \u00c9irinn<\/em> and the Invention of Irish History,” published in 2014 by The Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies<\/a><\/em>, and “Writing on the Land of Ireland: Nationality, Textuality, and Geography in the Acallam na Sen\u00f3rach<\/em><\/a>,”\u00a0published in Hortulus<\/em> in 2011.<\/p>\n My research into the\u00a0Acallam na Sen\u00f3rach<\/a> <\/em>demonstrates that this medieval account of an exchange between Saint Patrick and two Fenian heroes offered a multigeneric model for relating past narratives and constructing Irish identity within an Archipelagic context. The\u00a0Acallam\u00a0<\/em>constructs a highly textual version of Irish identity by linking the people of Ireland with their geographic space through the narratives told about both. In this way, the Acallam\u00a0<\/em>responds directly to claims made by colonialist texts such as Gerald of Wales\u2019s Topographia Hibernica,<\/i><\/em> which attempted to separate the people of Ireland from their land in order to justify the Anglo-Norman invasion. The\u00a0Acallam <\/i><\/em>is notable for its self-conscious approach to collecting and reworking materials from several different textual traditions, including place-name lore, Fenian legends, and the\u00a0Lives<\/em> of saints. In addition to being an important source on early Irish history for centuries, the\u00a0Acallam<\/em> also established the efficacy of multi-textual historical accounts in supporting Irish identity and resisting colonialist claims.<\/p>\n Several centuries later, Geoffrey Keating\u00a0would follow the\u00a0Acallam<\/em>‘s model to\u00a0construct a multi-generic defense of Irish identity and sovereignty in his ca. 1643\u00a0Foras Feasa ar \u00c9irinn<\/a> <\/em>(Foundation of Knowledge on Ireland<\/em>, <\/em>often called the History of Ireland<\/em><\/a><\/em>). The\u00a0Foras Feasa\u00a0<\/em>incorporates the repetitive typological structure of medieval sc\u00e9la<\/em> (“stories”) within humanist narrative history to produce a new genre of Irish national history. Keating\u00a0asserts that the Irish historian\u2019s task is to distinguish poetical truths from historical ones, but not to quarantine legend from history. Instead, Keating makes legends integral to his “Foundation of Knowledge on Ireland,” constructing the practice of reading Irish history as one that requires the ability to recognize links among collections of similar tales. This historiographic paradigm demands contextualized reading practices and deep familiarity with Irish sources, thereby rebutting many British versions of Irish history, which tended to isolate purportedly risible tales to claim that all of Ireland\u2019s records were equally unreliable.<\/p>\n Keating was one of many early modern writers whose work shows that adapting the practices and materials of medieval history was an effective strategy for addressing the political, historiographic, and religious exigencies of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. For example, Roderic\u00a0O\u2019Flaherty\u2019s 1685 Ogygia<\/em> deploys chronicles, genealogies, synchronisms, and king-lists to assert that Ireland\u2019s historical record, which related a long and independent line of Irish kings, is supported by its consistency with established world chronology. Ogygia <\/em>traces the kingship of Ireland from the legendary sons of M\u00edleadh to King Charles II, whom O\u2019Flaherty praises as restoring peace to Ireland after Cromwellian conquest. Though chronicles have been disparaged by both early modern and current scholars for following uncritical and obsolete historiographic practices, Ogygia<\/em> demonstrates that the supposed defects of chronicles\u2014their lack of continuity and rigid annular framework\u2014could be turned into strengths, as when O\u2019Flaherty compresses 405 years of English rule in Ireland into a single chronicle entry to bolster his claim that the Stuart kings were a continuation of the Irish royal line.<\/p>\n A partial genealogy from Geoffrey Keating’s <\/em>Foras Feasa, 1913 Irish Texts Society edition<\/em><\/p><\/div>\n British writers, as much as Irish ones, recognized the power of medieval methods and genres.\u00a0The supposedly non-evaulative quality of chronicles\u2014their lack of interest in underlying causes\u2014which was often treated as a failing of the genre, could also be turned to the writer\u2019s benefit. A number of seventeenth-century writers handled potentially sensitive recent histories by presenting them as chronicles or annals\u00a0and invoking the form’s impartiality to mitigate the controversial nature of their work. For example, the full title of John\u00a0Rushworth’s 1686 Historical Collections <\/i>advertises that the text is “impartially related and disposed in annals,” setting\u00a0forth “only matter of fact in order of time, without observation or reflection.”<\/p>\n “Impartial” is a term that is often associated with annals, as in Hamon L\u2019Estrange\u2019s \u00a01655 The reign of King Charles an history faithfully and impartially delivered and disposed into annals<\/a><\/em> and in Thomas Frankland\u2019s 1681 Annals of King James and King Charles the First<\/a>,<\/em>\u00a0whose full title asserts that the annals contain “a faithful history and impartial account of the great affairs of state, and transactions of parliaments in England.”\u00a0In these texts, the ostensibly non-evaluative nature of annals is treated as an asset, allowing writers to relate recent history while claiming an impartiality that helps prevent a return to the devastatingly divisive politics they describe.<\/p>\n Despite these and other examples of historiographic\u00a0fictions and medievalisms,\u00a0early modern history was not a disciplinary free-for-all.\u00a0The many texts that discuss how to recognize and respond to fictions, fables, and legends in historical works reveal the depth of early modern historians’ interest in establishing the parameters of their discipline. For example, in his 1606 Historie of Great Britannie<\/a><\/i><\/em>, John Clapham writes that numerous Arthurian traditions are “matters indeede more fit for feined Legends, and poeticall fictions, then for a Historie, which ought to be a Register of things, either truely done, or at least, warrantable by probabilitie.” John Speed’s 1611 Historie of Great Britaine<\/a><\/em>\u00a0picks up this theme to repeat William of Malmesbury\u2019s assertion that King Arthur “being the only proppe that upheld his country” does not deserve to be “abused with fables” and to single out the tradition that Merlin brought Stonehenge from Ireland to Salisbury Plain as a “ridiculous report” (164).<\/p>\n This project is designed to explore the questions of why<\/em> and how<\/em> early modern writers continued to work with “poeticall fictions” despite the prevalence of criticisms like Speed’s and Clapham’s. I am particularly invested in tracking the methods\u00a0that writers used to validate their own historical accounts and to counter potential dismissals of their work as no better than fiction.\u00a0The varied and complex strategies that scholars\u00a0adopted to defend their references to Britain and Ireland’s often-challenged heroic traditions and origin legends show that late seventeenth-century uses\u00a0of medieval materials were closely engaged with contemporary debates about the proper scope and methods of history.<\/p>\nHistory and Legend in National Narratives<\/h1>\n
Chronicling (Early) Modernity<\/strong><\/h1>\n
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<\/a>Poetical Fictions and Ridiculous Reports<\/strong><\/h1>\n
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