Control in a time of conflict:  Women’s petitions in Ireland from 1541 to 1584

This dissertation provides the first comprehensive and detailed study of Anglophone women’s petition letter-writing in Tudor Ireland, from 1541-1583. This project provides both microhistories and quantitative rhetorical analysis of twenty-two female petitioners and fifty seven individual petitions. It considers women’s petitions, as well as letters written in their support, in order to examine the breadth of Irish women’s petitionary involvement with the English state, and their immediate connections with the cultural and political events of the Tudor period. It focuses on the written petitions of Old English nobility, Native Irish, New English settlers, and soldiers’ wives . The project explains the many reasons they wrote (such as land and wages, or protection for their husbands and children), and it provides detailed case studies of the rhetorical strategies they employed to successfully navigate their struggles. Two chapters contextualize and quantify the number of women petitioners in Ireland from 1541-1583. These chapters place women within a narrative of events and shows their specific petitionary responses. The remaining chapters look at the specific petitionary challenges of individual women in order to demonstrate the various roles women held as petitioners, the complexities of addressing their concerns, the administrative resistance they faced, and the skill with which they deployed male supporters on their behalf.

Publisher

NUI Galway

Rights

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Ireland
CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 IE

cbn

Collections

University of Galway Theses (PhD Theses)