Irish Demons: English Writings on Ireland, the Irish, and Gender by Spenser and His Contemporaries.(Book Review)

Irish Demons: English Writings on Ireland, the Irish, and Gender by Spenser and his Contemporaries. By JOAN FITZPATRICK. Lanham, MD, New York, and Oxford: University Press of America. 2000. ix + 185 pp. $36.50. ISBN 0-761-81735-2.

Recently there have been a number of books and articles analysing the role that Ireland and the Irish played in Edmund Spenser's Anglocentric imagination, so many, perhaps that some critics now complain that the Irish question has swamped, dominated, and distorted any other form of approach to his writings. There is some force in this complaint, but that does not mean that we have heard the last word on the subject of that there is nothing left to write. Joan Fitzpatrick's contribution is centred on the question of gender, an important and timely subject that few previous critics have dealt with perceptively of substantially.

Irish Demons consists of eight chapters, a loose alliance of essays dealing with the relationship between Ireland, gender, and religion in English Renaissance writings. The first analyses Spenser's A View of the Present State of Ireland and the anonymous 'A Supplication of the Blood of the English' (c. 1599), recently transcribed by Willy Maley; the second examines the representation of the conflict between religious truth and error in Spenser's writings; the third looks at various figures in The Faerie Queene--e.g. Acrasia, Ruddymane--and suggests that they are taken from an Irish context; the fourth examines the negative representation of Irish women and Ireland allegorically represented as a woman in Spenser and Shakespeare; the fifth continues this theme to show how the Irish were frequently written out of the landscape to assert an English right to the island; the sixth looks at the figure of Munera in The Faerie Queene, book 6 (often misspelt by ignorant critics), to show how violence against the female other was often justified; the seventh shows how the lawless Irish are represented in the act of destroying English pastoral idylls by Spenser; and the last chapter examines Spenser's figure of Mutabilitie to show how the Irish were damned as fickle and dangerous enemies.

Fitzpatrick makes a number of good points in the course of her study. She writes well on religion and has an eye for allegorical detail based on historical events, ...