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This chapter explores the thematic connections between two English works rife with pro-Protestant Reformation-era politics and religious polemic, John Derricke's Image of Irelande, with a Discoverie of Woodkarne (1581) and John Foxe's Actes and Monuments (1560s) (also known as the Book of Martyrs). Both works were published by John Day in London. This chapter highlights Derricke’s apocalyptic rhetoric as well as similarities between his sophisticated visual program of woodcuts, Foxe’s title page, and the religious prints of Albrecht Dürer. Derricke's visual scheme of twelve woodcuts is bifurcated in style between the ‘damned’ Irish and the civilized English who conquered them. Sir Henry Sidney, Derricke's hero against the rebel Irish, is portrayed as more of a Christ-like judge than previously understood.
This chapter considers the possibility that 'ocean' developed not only in reaction to Sir Walter Ralegh's courtly woes, including the Arthur Throckmorton disgrace of 1592, but also as a result, or reflection, of his colonial progress in the New World and Ireland. Ralegh's heroic actions while a soldier in Ireland also inspired allegorized episodes in Edmund Spenser's romance-epic The Faerie Queene, which is dedicated in part to Ralegh. Ralegh's poem was first published in 1870, soon after its discovery in Hatfield House, which location indicates that it may have been sent directly to the Cecils as original audience. Both Ralegh and Throckmorton would be exiled from Elizabeth's court. Like rapacious Lust, or a mad Irish king, Ralegh (and his wife) remains outside the pale of good repute.
This collection of sixteen essays, the first devoted to John Derricke’s work, offers new readings of, and new sources behind, The Image of Irelande: With a Discoverie of Woodkarne (1581), all to better explicate facets of this difficult and complex book. While prior scholarship on Derricke was largely confined to commentary on the illustrations, the essays in this volume encompass a broad range of approaches to the Image of Irelande in its entirety. Although on the face of it, The Image is blatantly pro-Sidney and anti-Irish propaganda, and has always been so received, the essays in this collection combine to suggest that Derricke’s book is in fact far more culturally and politically daring than has been assumed, with a highly sophisticated textual and visual presentation only now brought into focus. In addition to scrutinizing Derricke’s poetic and iconographic practices, the essays include insights from architecture and archaeology, print history and reading practices, studies of civic display and colonial ideologies. The collection, divided into five sections (Ideologies, Archaeologies, Print and publication, Influences, and Interpretations), establishes a basis on which to build future analyses of Derricke’s enigmatic book.
The Introduction to the book offers a historical and literary contextualization of the Image. The editors address the text’s rich historical connections; the little-known background of the author, John Derricke; the brief, but impactful reception of the work; the immediate and contemporary reaches of the Image. Lastly, the editors summarize the collection’s chapters, linking many of the ideas contained in the work. In general, the Introduction seeks to present information about the work, its characters, and its sordid history, ultimately arguing for its early modern significance to a variety of disciplines.
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book presents historical and literary work on Sir Walter Ralegh's courtly context, including the new editions of letters and poems. It highlights aspects of Ralegh as writer and his visual image that are the subjects of new or renewed scholarly interest. The book examines the complex, ambiguous relationship between Raleigh and Edmund Spenser while they were part of the English settlement in Ireland and afterwards in London. It analyses the famous exchange between Christopher Marlowe's 'Passionate Shepherd to his Love' and Ralegh's 'Nymph's Reply', and the four centuries of variations on that theme. The book focuses on visual presentations of Ralegh, a man famous for outward ostentation.