ABSTRACT
In announcing a recent auction for ‘the ‘oldest-known map of Ireland’, the Irish Times described it as being made ‘at a time when Ireland was at the edge of the known western world—and travel to this country would have been the 15th-century equivalent of a voyage to the moon’. 2 In this way the article celebrated Ireland’s connection to broader European and world history by virtue of its inclusion in a Venetian atlas, and yet simultaneously exoticized it by likening the island to lunar otherness. That tension between seeing Ireland and the Irish as quintessentially European and yet ‘owning’ and highlighting the designation of European ‘other’ is a central one in early modern Irish Studies. As the Times piece succinctly demonstrates, it is also an element in popular discourse. But while the claim in the article makes good copy, it is inaccurate: connection between Ireland and Britain was strong and operative at the elite and non-elite levels; links with the Continent, while less frequent or sustained, existed in both English and Gaelic parts of the island. Considering the Times article in light of this ongoing bifurcated approach to Irish studies, we can, on the one hand, simply conclude ‘no harm done’, recognizing the obvious hyperbole and not chastising the author or editor for attempting to fool us with false claims. They know better, we know better; the space travel analogy was just for effect. On the other hand, however, I think we can acknowledge that the author does indeed know full well the analogy is inaccurate and respect the needs of journalistic style, while also recognizing that such ‘throwaway’ lines are symptomatic of the much deeper and complex tension at the heart of Irish studies mentioned earlier—the simultaneous desire to both externally associate and to self-exoticize—and understanding that the inability to effectively balance or erase that tension has hobbled the development of the field.
