Spenser's Use of Famine as a Weapon of War in
A View of the Present State of Ireland
Introduction
This module, written by Professor of History Susannah Ottaway, encourages students and educators to engage more deeply with the section of Edmund Spenser’s View of the Present State of Ireland (c. 1596; published 1633) that students always find most haunting: that which explains Spenser’s strategic design to use famine to end Irish resistance to English rule. Using specific features of the computer model of Kilcolman —emphasizing its setting, in particular— this module deepens the viewer’s understanding of the underlying assumptions of the View, and the historical legacies that can be revealed by this disturbing text.
Bibliography/Additional Reading
Further readings on race in the Renaissance include:
Ian Campbell, Renaissance Humanism and Ethnicity before Race: The Irish and the English in the Seventeenth-Century (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2013).
Jean Feerick, Strangers in Blood: Relocating Race in the Renaissance (Toronto, CA: University of Toronto, 2010).
Kim Hall, Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995, reissued 2018).
Spenser Studies 35 (2021): Special Issue on Race