ABSTRACT
Bernadette Cunningham contrasts Scottish Gaelic verse composed by women to Irish language poetry in the same period. Finding that Scottish women poets are 'transitional poets, typical of the seventeenth century, poets not trained professionally in the bardic schools, but having an appreciation of the ideology which had informed the bardic tradition', she surmises that 'No compositions by comparable women poets survive from seventeenth-century Ireland' (154). The subject of this essay is an important and promising exception to Cunningham's rule. Caitlin Dubh, the author of five elegies on members of the O'Brien family of Thomond, county Clare, is a key example of a woman composing poetry in Irish c.l624-1630. These poems are important in a number of contexts: that of Irish women's writing; that of seventeenth-century Irish poetic practice; and that of the functions and interpretations of such poetry at a time of enormous change in Irish society. They skilfully negotiate the demands of competing allegiances; they appropriate the military achievements and English alliances of the Irish patron to Gaelic ideological tradition; and they rewrite the tropes by which an Irish noble is traditionally mourned by a male poet.
