Plantation, Contagion, and Containment in Spenser and Bryskett

Early modern Ireland was notoriously, or reputedly, a place of disease: the plague, the ague, the country fever, the looseness, the bloody flux, and an assortment of coughs, chills, sweats, and other illnesses—Ireland’s endemii morbi or “reigning diseases”—regularly figure in surviving letters and historical accounts from the period. This essay explores not only the reports of disease issuing from Ireland at this time, but the way in which the experience and rhetoric of contagion help to shape ideas about space, security, and civility in the colonial theory of the period. In Spenser’s View of the present state of Ireland (c. 1596) and Bryskett’s A Discourse of Ciuill Life (1606), illness and its metaphors seem to correlate with, and perhaps to occasion, complex responses to the alleged disorder and promiscuity of the Irish—energies evident, too, in the military and political strategies of deputies Sir Henry Sidney, Arthur Lord Grey, and Sir Arthur Chichester. This essay sees Spenser’s View and Bryskett’s Discourse as polemical attempts – at key moments before the planting of Munster and Ulster – to push New English colonial policy away from the morbid failures of Pale government and violent military suppression toward the corpus sanum of plantation.