Print, rhetoric, and 'plantation,' 1571-1641

Abstract

This thesis offers a new model for understanding the rise of the word plantation as a keyword of anglophone colonialism in the early seventeenth century. Generally approached as a simple (and perhaps simplistic) synonym for colony in both the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,plantation is missing from printed Elizabethan texts which promoted colonial settlement in Ireland and the Americas. Instead, in a colonial context,plantation rose to sudden prominence in promotional pamphlets published in 1609 and 1610, and James VI/I was an active agent in this discursive shift. Tracing the word’s colonial appropriation to a previously unrecognized connection with sixteenth-century pamphleteering regarding the dissolution of the monasteries, the thesis argues that plantation had taken on a distinctive association with religious reform and divine providence by the time the word was adopted as the Jacobean name for colonial settlement. Thus, plantation offered a means for suggesting both classical and Christian authorities for the colonial enterprise - a duality not open to colony. More definitively than kingdom, colony, or commonwealth, the word plantation yoked the civil and the ecclesiastical, and transformed the colonial promotional pamphlet into a space where monarch and subject could publicly, but indirectly, contest competing conceptions of the relationship between temporal and spiritual authority. Through rhetorical analysis which considers how the printed form was engaged in the making of meaning, the thesis provides a study of the colonial promotional pamphlet from 1571, when print was first used to promote a particular English colonial project, to 1641, when violence broke out on “plantation” lands in Ireland. It offers new readings of colonial texts by Walter Ralegh, Francis Bacon, Thomas Blenerhasset, John Davies, John Donne, and John Cotton; an examination of the rhetoric of “plantation” as it was deployed by James VI/I; and an analysis of the word’s appearances in the 1641 Depositions.

Date of Award	Dec 2013
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	Queen's University Belfast
Supervisor	Ramona Wray (Supervisor)