ABSTRACT
This essay makes a case for close reading of bardic professional praise poetry as an exciting new direction for the study of early modern Ireland in all its artistic, cultural, and sociopolitical complexity. 1 By performing historicized, sociopolitically contextualized, literary close reading of late sixteenth and early seventeenth-century works, we grasp bardic poetry’s primary function of praise and counsel, but also gain insight into elite preoccupations and perspectives as well as bardic training, norms, and patronly relations at a time of considerable strain. During our period, the conditions under which poets wrote were rapidly changing, as patrons and patronage became scarcer due to both legislation against the bardic institution and the violently unsettled conditions of the time, with professional poets’ increasing precarity and resulting modes of accommodation particularly vivid from the 1560s onward. The intrinsic interest of this material as well as the richer portrait of the society and people it offers suggest that this multifaceted yet underanalyzed literature not only deserves our attention but belongs on the reading list of every scholar and student of early modern Ireland. 2
