“Wonne with Custome”: Conquest and Etymology in the Spenser-Harvey Letters and A View of the Present State of Ireland

Abstract

This essay argues for a connection between two texts that are usually considered unrelated, Edmund Spenser’s A View of the Present State of Ireland and his correspondence with Gabriel Harvey that preceded it by nearly twenty years. Both texts negotiate the problem of implementing foreign rule, whether poetic or political, by appealing to a major intellectual and political reference point of the period: the concept of custom. In the Letters both Spenser and Harvey treat custom as the mechanism that makes the foreign familiar, drawing upon a widespread classical and early modern understanding of custom. At the same time, however, they appeal to and subvert the sixteenth-century English legal discourse of custom as it was developed in the realm of common law, wherein custom is figured as a form of resistance to foreign imposition, especially in the context of the Norman Conquest. This self-conscious probing of the complex and at times contradictory logic of legal custom provides a heuristic framework for Spenser’s approach to custom’s thorny role in the conquest of Ireland in A View. As a result of his exchange with Harvey, Spenser foregrounds the difficulty, even futility, of deploying language, with its vexed and layered etymologies, in the service of a political project.