Re-Viewing Edmund Spenser's A View of the Present State of Ireland: a symposium

"Re-Viewing Edmund Spenser's A View of the Present State of Ireland" is a two-day, multidisciplinary colloquium focusing on Spenser's longest and most controversial piece of prose writing.  Formal papers will be of normal conference length (20-30 minutes) and grouped in panels, including time for open discussion.  A plenary address and poetry reading will take place on the first evening of the conference. The papers may or may not be recorded in podcast form.

The conference format follows that of the symposium on John Derricke's Image of Irelande (1581) organized at Case Western in 2016:  http://core.ecu.edu/engl/herront/derricke/derricke.html

Despite constant attention to Spenser's work among academics, no scholarly collection of essays has been dedicated to theView and ​no scholarly edition has appeared in over twenty years, since Willy Maley and Andrew Hadfield's lightly edited (1997) volume of Ware's 1633 edition. 

Parts of the View are famous (and often misunderstood) in isolated quotation, the work is frequently mined for anecdotes when analyzing Spenser's poetry, and many scholars have argued about the place of the View in the ideological and colonial developments of its time and ours.  Nonetheless, its overall purpose and structure as a literary artifact are still not well understood. Nor has its highly detailed treatment of antiquarian ethnography, military infrastructure and practical administration come under sustained analysis.  Exciting new work has recently been done by historians editing Tudor-era English military tracts and policy papers concerning Ireland, but not the View.  

Where does Spenser's work stand in relation to these and other administrative writings?  Where does it stand in relation to his sources and to his own poetry, outside of Book V of The Faerie Queene (1596)? Where does the View stand in relation to the poetry and prose of other writers?  What challenges do its many manuscript versions pose to scholars? These and other questions will be addressed, including formal closing comments at the end of the symposium.

Banner Illustration: detail from Richard Bartlett, Plan of Monaghan Fort, Ulster, c. 1602

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