Edmund Spenser’s View of the Present State of Ireland (1596): Re-Appraised

Spenser’s View has, for centuries, been treated variously as a trove of prejudiced antiquarian lore useful for disparaging Irish people at moments of crisis, and as a store house of evidence that the English government engaged upon an Irish genocide in Elizabethan times. This lecture offers a radical re-appraisal of the manuscript copy that Spenser left to posterity in 1596, and asks what motivated Spenser to take time from poetic composition to write this prose dialogue, what circumstances influenced his composition of different passages, and what sources and methods he used to underpin the ideas advanced by his interlocutors?

Event Details

Date:: 7 October, 2024, 13:00 – 14:15
Venue: Royal Irish Academy
Availability: Tickets Available

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The RIA is pleased to host Nicholas Canny's lecture, as part of the Dublin Festival of History programme.

Nicholas Canny is an expert of early modern history broadly defined. His most recent book was Imagining Ireland’s Pasts: Early Modern Ireland through the Centuries (Oxford, 2021). He is currently engaged upon a fresh annotated edition of Edmund Spenser, A View of the Present State of Ireland [1596]. He was elected a Member of the Royal Irish Academy (1981), a Fellow of the British Academy (2005), of Academia Europaea, (1995), of the American Philosophical Society (2007) and of Real Academia de la Historia (Madrid) (2011). He was the first person from Ireland to be appointed a Member of the Scientific Council of the European Research Council on which he served 2011-2016. Nicholas Canny was also elected as President of the Royal Irish Academy for the triennium, 2008-11.Image credit: Kilcolman Castle, from The works of Edmund Spenser (1857), frontispiece by J. W. Archer, via Wikimedia Commons

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