The Severed Head and the Grafted Tongue: Literature, Translation and Violence in Early Modern Ireland by Patricia Palmer (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Severed Head and the Grafted Tongue: Literature, Translation and Violence in Early Modern Ireland by Patricia Palmer Patrick Murray The Severed Head and the Grafted Tongue: Literature, Translation and Violence in Early Modern Ireland, by Patricia Palmer, pp. 185. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. $90. William Faulkner’s aphorism that “The past is never dead. It’s not even past” emphasizes the relevance of the historical to the present. Imbued with all sorts of insinuations and counter-insinuations, claims and counter-claims, prejudices and counter-prejudices, the perception of the past remains a decisive factor in the reaction to current affairs. Placed in the context of Ireland, and in particular its partitioned Northern statelet, which keeps a tentative peace after centuries-old violence and enmity, history can be an incendiary device. Providing a narrative of the history of Ireland, and especially Ireland in the early modern period necessitates engaging with contemporary events in a profound and often fraught way: as David Edwards, Pádraig Lenihan and Clodagh Tait reminded us in Age of Atrocity: Violence and Political Conflict in Early Modern Ireland (2007), “so much of Ireland’s twentieth-century conflict could be traced back to early modern origins.” The significances of articulating a history of the epoch in question are doubly intensified by the authorial voice. “Who said that?” is not just a query; depending upon its source it can prove a provocative accusation. In 1995, Ian Paisley made a speech to a gathering of Protestant Orange Order members in Drumcree. In the face of attempts to reach a resolution regarding the contentious issue of parades in the province, the future first minister provided his own outline of Ireland’s troubled past in forthright tones: Some of us know our history. Some of us know who the followers of the [other] are. What their oath is. What their aim is. Their aim is for the extermination of heresy, and we are the heretics, and they have not changed their objective. I say to that priest tonight—you may take on other people . . . but you can’t take on Ulster Protestants. Our forefathers knew the system that you represent. They knew its darkness, its superstition and its priestcraft and its epeolatry and its idolatry. And with that system as Bible Christians we have nothing to do, and we will not bow in subjection to it. [End Page 147] Verbalizing a history characterized by binary oppositions—ours and theirs, Protestant and priest, Ulster and non-Ulster—Paisley’s words also underline the significance of the narrative voice in the recording of past events. His remark “Some of us know our history” at once claims history and simultaneously reveals its very subjectivity. It strives for neutrality, seeking to espouse a detached “true” account of events. At the same time it also, through its narrator, remains inescapably biased. As Patricia Palmer’s engaging book reveals, the tongue that narrates—and the head to which it is attached—is freighted with especial importance in the context of early modern Ireland, an arena where beheading was viewed not only as an act of terror but also a legitimate policy of government. Moreover, where the dual roles of the severed head as a literary trope and a trophy of war coexisted, the aesthetic and the atrocious were often indistinguishable. “Bouncing, winking, cursing, crying out, such heads,” Palmer observes, “haunt the extraordinary range of literary works that emerged from the Elizabethan conquest of Ireland.” In investigating the role of such an object in the landscape of sixteenth-century Anglo-Irish relations, Palmer elegantly draws out what it meant to be the propagator, perpetrator, and victim of decapitation in an epoch where barbarism and erudite civility often commingled with shocking ease. The litany of violence recounted by the author will strike the reader most forcefully. Recent volumes such as the aforementioned Age of Atrocity, and the recuperation of Henry Sidney’s journal A Viceroy’s Vindication: Sir Henry Sidney’s Memoir of Service in Ireland 1556–78 (2002) by Ciarán Brady, have enhanced our awareness of the ferocity of the martial engagement between the native Irish populace and the colonizing New English forces. Brady...