Framing civil life in elizabethan ireland:Bryskett, spenser andThe Discourse of Civill Life

This paper argues that Lodowick Bryskett's account of a conversation with Edmund Spenser in The Discourse of Civill Life (1606), in which a broadly Aristotelian ethical framework is coordinated with the social ends of the Protestant empire building, examines the collisions of humanist theory and governmental practice in the New English polity in Ireland. It interrogates both the possibility of a coherent philosophical foundation for political action and the transformative pressures exerted by the exercise of political power on those philosophical precepts. The Discourse thus shows the complex and contrasting ways in which two figures at the vanguard of Elizabethan moral philosophy, and on the fraught and violent front lines of Elizabethan imperial power, sought to mediate humanist ideals about the nature and practice of civil life with the daily exigencies of establishing and maintaining the early modern colonial state.