ABSTRACT
For Spenser, the rural labor of the New English provided the foundation for an imperial ideology, or a “georgic spirit,” which sought to build an anglicized, hierarchical Protestant pastoral and civil society out of the so-called fertile “wasteland” of a rebellious Ireland and Munster in particular. The overlapping intellectual circles of Sir Henry Sidney, the earl of Leicester and the successive earls of Essex, from the 1560s on, helped to create and support the New English and specifically Spenserian “agenda” in its attempt to transform large swathes of attainted Munster land, after the failed Desmond rebellion of 1579-83, into a hospitably pacified, Protestant-controlled and especially profitable imperial domain for the English crown, its Lord Deputies and innovative soldierplanters.
