“Medieval Irish Law as Alternative Justice in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Ireland”
Ciaran McDonough, University College Dublin
The mid-nineteenth-century project to translate the corpus of medieval Irish law brought a specialist subject area into the public domain. The publication of the legal tracts across the second half of the nineteenth century, not only highlighted the vast amount of medieval Irish legal material, but served also as a rallying point for Irish nationalists, who saw another way to shake off the British yoke. This paper examines the presentation of the laws as, what Heather Laird terms, an alternative legal space separate from English law in the nineteenth century; how medieval Irish law was considered as a replacement legal system in an imagined independent Ireland to serve justice in a more Irish way; and, in an independent Ireland, as a means to justice when denied by official channels.
‘“A Young Man Is Dead, a Legend Has Been Born.’ The Death of Bobby Sands: an Extreme Act of Redemptive Violence?”
John Braidwood, University of Oulu
In the contested space of Northern Ireland Bobby Sands has remained a powerfully divisive figure; he is much derided by his detractors and the subject of much hyperbole by his supporters. To some he is a Christ-like, messianic, martyr-icon, to others a bloodthirsty, murderous terrorist. For many Bobby Sands represented a combination of traditional sentimental Roman Catholic devotionalism and the collective self-deification of the anticipation of ultimate salvation, a liberation theology of sorts; for others this convicted bomber and ‘gunman’ quickly came to embody all of the heinous crimes of the IRA. His emaciated body lies at the core of the Peace Process in Northern Ireland, his death being the watershed in the Troubles, representing the point where a vortex of hopelessness turned paradoxically into glimmers of hope and the seeds for an end to the conflict; a potent, redemptive event of catalysing intensity in a time of deepening despair. Where is the real Bobby Sands? The H-Block Protests and the ten deaths were greeted with increasingly uncomprehending consternation by the British, and mostly with bemused indifference towards a distant and remote – almost foreign – ‘northern problem’ in the South of Ireland, while worsening the old antagonisms in the North. The manner of his dying and death attracted global sympathy and interest, which rapidly tipped the balance in favour of northern Republicanism. Is it time now to finally lay Bobby Sands to rest?
“Poetry and «the Pencil of Love»: The Early Anglo-Irish Ekphrasis of Mary Tighe”
Charles Armstrong, University of Agder
Although ample critical attention has been paid to Irish literature responding to the visual arts in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, little notice has been given to pre-Yeatsian ekphrasis in Ireland. This paper will look at two early instances of poetry about pictures in the writings of Mary Tighe (1772-1810). Tighe’s “The Picture: Written for Angela” and “To Lady Charlemont, in Return for her Presents of Flowers, March, 1808” will be shown to be heavily marked by their time, evincing distinctive traits characteristic of the Age of Sensibility, Irish Protestant privilege drawing upon the tradition of the Grand Tour, and a form of Romantic manuscript culture. But Tighe will also be shown to anticipate later developments that still not have been given full critical cognizance. By demonstrating links between her ekphrastic practice and Richardson’s novels, I will challenge the usually so water-tight separation between poetic and prose ekphrasis, even while showing how Tighe probes into the neglected parerga at the borders of the visual representation. Tighe will also be shown to anticipate later emphasis on the aesthetics of ekphrasis, as she aligns visual art with a non-instrumental gift of flowers from her friend, Lady Charlemont. The Eros and agency of the visual object – what pictures want, as thematized in the work of W. J. T. Mitchell – will also be seen to be at work in these early and unjustly neglected instances of Irish ekphrasis.
“Divine (In)Justice in Charles Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer”
Joakim Wrethed, Stockholm University
In his introduction to the Oxford World’s Classics edition of Melmoth, Chris Baldick suggests the following: “When … Melmoth defends the Protestant view of the Bible against the Catholic Church, and we recall that this uncharacteristic behaviour is being related to us in a Jewish text transmitted by a Catholic, something more is involved than mere clumsiness or forgetfulness: an inadvertent dissolution of distinctions is taking place in which the same voice can utter sacrilegious sarcasms and pious platitudes almost in the same breath, erasing the clear line that was expected to lie between them in an ‘improving’ work of fiction” (xvi). The Irish context of Maturin’s self-deconstructing project is decisive. The Protestant rhetoric only strengthens the Catholic resistance in the way it would in an Irish political context (applied power always provokes opposition). In the novel, the Protestant impulse that Maturin at least seems to be driven by is a sterness that only functions as a catalyst for the dissolving of distinctions that Baldick draws attention to. The Gothic outcome is a display of the only justice, the fate of desire. The sought purity of the Panoptic eye becomes something like the eye in Georges Bataille’s The Story of an Eye: “‘Put it up my arse, Sir Edmund,’ Simone shouted. And Sir Edmund delicately glided the eye between her buttocks” (66). This paper examines the functioning of (in)justice in Melmoth, mainly in its theological dimensions.