The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Ireland were marked by the centralization and expansion of royal power under Tudor and Stuart monarchs. With this project came sustained attacks on the native Gaelic aristocracy, as well as the elite literary culture which it sustained. Some members of the aristocracy, capitulating to the demands of the Crown, sent their sons to be educated in Dublin or in England. Others, in response to military defeat, dispossession, and ongoing cultural pressures, sought refuge on the Continent: would-be clerics pursued education in European seminaries, displaced aristocrats found positions in the courts and militaries of Catholic monarchs, and scribes and poets often followed their patrons into exile.
A characteristic of Gaelic poetry of this period is an increasing awareness of and interest in Classical antiquity: praise poets in Ireland and Scotland would liken their patrons to famous heroes of the ancient past, and draw exempla from Classical narrative, especially accounts of the Trojan War and Caesar’s civil war. Unsurprisingly, several poems which address the upheavals and migrations of the era do so in reference to the various perambulations, exiles, and homecomings of Classical tradition.
This presentation will explore the ways in which Gaelic poets of the period made use of Classical tradition in political poems of exile and repossession. Particular attention will be paid to the works of the Ulster poet Fearghal Óg Mac an Bhaird (fl. 1560-1620), and his poems to Uí Dhomhnaill patrons who fled Ireland during the Flight of the Earls of 1607.