This chapter explains the legal metaphors used in the poems and prayers in the Psalms and elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible. It shows how these metaphors reflect an understanding of God and his relations to humanity that is grounded in a legal, even litigious, perspective. It shows how and why individuals would appeal to the divine court in their quest for justice.

Across its many forms, from lullabies to laments and songs, the oral tradition in Irish women’s poetry is rich and various. The oral tradition constitutes a body of subjugated knowledge, in the Foucauldian sense, having been subjected to cultural relegation and erasure in the modern period. Addressing the gaps in the tradition has been a significant challenge, then, as witnessed in Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill’s ‘What Foremothers?’, or attempts to unearth the work of Máire Ní Chrualaoich, ‘the Sappho of Munster’. The celebrated case of Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill occurs at the intersection of the tradition and the individual talent, as a unique personal occasion collides with long-established traditions of communal mourning (the caoineadh). Subsequent oral performers too have been no less outspoken on questions of marriage, women’s rights, the Famine, and other defining issues of their times, and no history of Irish women’s poetry is complete without an assessment of their contribution.

This essay surveys the small but compelling body of poetry written by women in Ireland, in English and Irish, in the seventeenth century. The Irish bardic tradition generally excluded women, but exceptions do occur, as when a bardic poem addressed to the teenaged Brighid Nic Gearailt elicits a response from its subject. The bardic poems of Caitlín Dubh are another exception again, memorialising an Irish-speaking Protestant loyalist, the Earl of Thomond. Women did, however, occupy a central role in the caoine/caoineadh traditions (the rituals of verse and oral lament). In the Anglophone tradition, poets such as Mary Sidney Herbert, Anne Southwell, and Katherine Philips explore their marginality from their positions as colonial Protestant writers, while still engaging sympathetically with Ireland as setting and subject matter. The network of connections between writers and readers is often complex, but the picture that emerges comprehensively deepens our understanding of Irish poetry from this period.