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Nurse to all rebellions
Mar. 30th, 2014 06:36 pmNonfiction reading for March was Granuaile: Ireland’s Pirate Queen by Anne Chambers, a biography of Grace O’Malley aka Granuaile aka fifty million variant spellings. Going into this I mostly knew that Grace O’Malley was a sixteenth century Irish pirate queen who had met with Queen Elizabeth and is supposedly buried on Clare Island, which I take as a message from the universe that I need to go visit at some point.
This is a slim book, largely because not very much is known about Grace O’Malley’s life. A lot of the book details the political shenanigans in Ireland that the O’Malleys were dealing with, including rivalries between Gaelic chieftains, administrative tightening by Tudor England, and occasional interference from Spain. The book contains a good selection of maps and family trees, and explains the different factions and developments in a way that’s easy to read for someone unfamiliar with Irish history. It’s also pretty good about presenting the oddly spelled, wordy Tudor primary sources in a way that’s easy to decipher but still shows off the delightfully weird writing style.
My biggest issue with this book is that the edition I was reading (revised American edition from 2003) seems to have been rushed to print without so much as a single round of proofreading. For such a short book there were dozens of random misspellings, sentences missing words, and punctuation strewn about.
Granuaile herself comes across as a fascinating, complex, and shrewd historical character, highly political and nigh impossible to keep down for long. The family drama aspect of her life—all her relations were also political chieftains, making deals and alliances and factions and things—makes me think there could be a great serial drama made about her life. She was fighting and pirating and politicking, leading men into battle by land and sea, all the way up until at least her mid-sixties. She had an arch-nemesis—Sir Richard Bingham, the Puritan English governor of Connaught—and reading about her manipulating Queen Elizabeth herself into getting Bingham to back off is deeply satisfying.
Overall I’d really like to learn more, both about Granuaile and about the world she lived in, but this makes a very good primer for both.
This is a slim book, largely because not very much is known about Grace O’Malley’s life. A lot of the book details the political shenanigans in Ireland that the O’Malleys were dealing with, including rivalries between Gaelic chieftains, administrative tightening by Tudor England, and occasional interference from Spain. The book contains a good selection of maps and family trees, and explains the different factions and developments in a way that’s easy to read for someone unfamiliar with Irish history. It’s also pretty good about presenting the oddly spelled, wordy Tudor primary sources in a way that’s easy to decipher but still shows off the delightfully weird writing style.
My biggest issue with this book is that the edition I was reading (revised American edition from 2003) seems to have been rushed to print without so much as a single round of proofreading. For such a short book there were dozens of random misspellings, sentences missing words, and punctuation strewn about.
Granuaile herself comes across as a fascinating, complex, and shrewd historical character, highly political and nigh impossible to keep down for long. The family drama aspect of her life—all her relations were also political chieftains, making deals and alliances and factions and things—makes me think there could be a great serial drama made about her life. She was fighting and pirating and politicking, leading men into battle by land and sea, all the way up until at least her mid-sixties. She had an arch-nemesis—Sir Richard Bingham, the Puritan English governor of Connaught—and reading about her manipulating Queen Elizabeth herself into getting Bingham to back off is deeply satisfying.
Overall I’d really like to learn more, both about Granuaile and about the world she lived in, but this makes a very good primer for both.