Place and Empire in Irish Literature and Culture

‘Place and Empire’ investigates the relationship between medieval Irish topographical literature and the development of medieval Irish imperialism and anti-colonialism.

This project shows that Irish topographical literature--known as ""dindshenchas""--has always been a political tool, and that was initially cultivated to translate ideas of classical imperialism onto an Irish landscape.

Using the Latin epic tradition, Irish literati conceptualised Irish imperialism by composing origin narratives which validated authority over places.

Between the 9th and 12th centuries, these ideas were encoded into narratives about politically significant places under the patronage of dominant Irish dynasties.

In the wake of the Anglo-Norman invasion in the 12th century, the imperial impulse turned anti-colonial, as Irish topography was co-opted as an intellectual bulwark against colonial rule. The political use of Irish topography also finds parallels in contemporary medieval Welsh sources dealing with Ireland.

These sources foreshadow British imperialist designs and illustrate how Ireland’s colonial ‘othering’ by its neighbour was articulated through topography.

Irish topography was similarly connected to British colonial practices in the 19th century since the modern reception of the topographical literature began as part of an Irish Ordnance Survey project in the 1830s, under the auspices of the military branch of the British Empire. Engagement with places in reaction to major political shifts is not an exclusively medieval phenomenon.

Watershed events like Brexit or the war in Ukraine challenge our notion of the immutability of modern European borders and conjure the spectre of imperialism anew.

The recent trend which sees Welsh heritage sites adopting their original Welsh names, and the tabling of the question of Irish unity, are different reflexes of the same concern with places among the Irish and British public.