John Derricke's Image of Irelande, with a Discoverie of Woodkarne is a key work of English print-making, Irish and English history and cultural misunderstanding. The work attests to the complexity of English and Irish relations, colonisation, military history, imperial propaganda, poetry, art, printing and the forging of identity in the early modern British Isles. The original work comprises of a lengthy poetic narrative and twelve famous woodcuts of the highest quality produced in sixteenth-century England. They also represent some of the only contemporary views of early modern Ireland on record. The sixteen interdisciplinary essays in this collection focus on the text's political and historical meaning, print history, iconographic elements, paratexts, literary and artistic influences, and cultural archaeology. The collection will appeal to scholars of many disciplines.

List of plates and figures

1 Introduction
Thomas Herron, Denna J. Iammarino, and Maryclaire Moroney

Part I Ideologies
2 The transatlantic colonial context: John Derricke versus Edmund Spenser
Brian C. Lockey
3 Captain and Kern and Knight-in-Arms: martial identities and the subject of conquest in Derricke's Image of Irelande
Maryclaire Moroney

Part II Archaeologies
4 Animals make the man: violence, masculinity, and the colonial project in Derricke's Image of Irelande
John Soderberg
5 'Obedientia Civium Urbis Felicitas': Sir Henry Sidney's return to Dublin as depicted in John Derricke's Image of Irelande
Bríd McGrath
6 Derricke's Image of Irelande (1581) and late sixteenth-century Dublin
James Lyttleton

Part III Print and publication
7 Derricke, Day, and the Dutch, or a tale of woodcuts and woodkerns
Stuart Kinsella
8 'Framed and clothed with variety': print culture, multimodality, and visual design in Derricke's Image of Irelande
Andie Silva
9 Scotland's Image of Irelande: Scott, Small, and the Edinburgh Edition
Willy Maley and Alasdair Thanisch

Part IV Influences
10 Anxiety and influence: John Derricke's Image of Irelande and the Mirror for Magistrates tradition
Scott Lucas
11 'Patternes of rebellion': Derricke's rebel poems
Elisabeth Chaghafi
12 Irish apocalypse: Derricke, Dürer, and Foxe
Thomas Herron

V Interpretations
13 Clothed with variety: discovering the formal and figurative texture of John Derricke's Image of Irelande
Matthew Woodcock
14 Why read between the lines?: Derricke, paratext, and poetic reception
Denna J. Iammarino
15 John Derricke, Edmund Spenser, and the white wand of justice and equity
William O'Neil
16 'Aspice spectator sic me docuere parentes': aesthetico-political misprision in Derricke's A Discoverie of Woodkarne
Thomas Cartelli

Index

Editors

Thomas Herron is Professor of English at East Carolina University

Denna Iammarino is a Lecturer at the Case Western Reserve University

Maryclaire Moroney is Professor in English at the John Carroll University