Patricia Palmer

Biography

Patricia Palmer came to the University of Maynooth via King’s College London and the Universities of York and Oxford. Her work almost always finds itself positioned at the intersection of culture and conflict, in the troubled regions where violence and the aesthetic meet. Her first book, Language and Conquest in Early Modern Ireland: English Renaissance Literature and Elizabethan Imperial Expansion, is a study of linguistic imperialism. It traces both the originary moment of the language shift from Irish to English which has been so formative for Irish writing up to the present and the origins of English linguistic nationalism itself -- and the relationship between English Renaissance literature and imperial expansion. Her second book, The Severed Head and the Grafted Tongue, explores how the violence of the Elizabethan conquest bleeds into literature in English, Irish, Latin and Spanish. It is, among other things, a study of colonial brutality, of the real-world context of epic-romance, and of the politics of translation. fThere is a strong comparative element to Prof Palmer’s work. Language and Conquest frames its exploration of English linguistic colonisation in Ireland with an exploration of Spanish practice in South and Central America. The Severed Head and the Grafted Tongue, similarly, looks at translations made under the sign of the Tudor conquest – Sir John Harington’s translation of Orlando Furioso, Sir George Carew’s version of Ercilla’s La Araucana, and Richard Stanihurst’s Æneis – as well as exploring Gaelic responses to conquest and dispossession. Prof Palmer is currently working on ‘Darkness Echoing: Cultural Encounters in Renaissance Ireland’, a book that examines the plurality of literary cultures in early modern Ireland: two powerful literary traditions, Gaelic and English, clashed and interacted against a background of writing in Latin, Spanish and Italian by natives and newcomers alike. By tracing the surprising generic intersections and inadvertent intertextualities that emerged from that encounter, ‘Darkness Echoing’ brings us to the darker energies of the European Renaissance and to a world where creativity and destruction marched in lockstep.

Research Interest

English