From a View to a Discovery
Edmund Spenser, Sir John Davies, and the Defects of Law in the Realm of Ireland
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 9637357 |
|---|---|
| Authors | D Alan Orr (0000-0001-6128-8296, Ottawa, Ontario, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2003 |
| Volume | 38 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 395-408 |
| Publication date | 2003-12-01 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of History (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0008-4107 • E-ISSN: 2292-8502 |
| Publisher | University of Toronto Press Inc. (UTPress) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.3138/cjh.38.3.395 |
| OpenAlex | W301163570 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 2 |
This article is a comparative analysis of Edmund Spenser’s A View of the Present State of Ireland and Sir John Davies A’Discovery of the True Causes Why Ireland Was Never Entirely Subdued ... until the Beginning of His Majesty s Happy Reign. Over the past two decades, Nicholas Canny has argued for the centrality of Spenser’s View to the British colonial enterprise in Ireland during the seventeenth century, suggesting that Davies Discovery adhered closely to the ideas of Spenser on Irish affairs. These ideas were marked by an unabashed advocacy of military and judicial violence and a deep scepticism as to the effectiveness of the English common law, its procedures and values, in the settling of Irish affairs. This article challenges the interpretation of Canny arguing alternatively that these two texts offer, not only rival views on the efficacy of the English law in Ireland as an agent of cultural change, but also competing narrative models for writing the history of early modern Ireland, one ethnological deriving from Spenser’s View and one sovereignty-centered deriving from Davies Discovery
Art · Colonialism · Epistemology · Interpretation (philosophy) · Irish · Literature · Majesty · Narrative · Political science · Politics · Realm · Reign · Skepticism · Sociology · Sovereignty · State (computer science) · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Historical Legal Studies and Society · History · Law · Philosophy · Seventeenth-Century Political and Philosophical Thought
| Citations per year | 0.25 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2018 - 2019 (2) |
| Highly cited | No |