Exhumation and Ethnic Conflict: From <i>St. Erkenwald</i> to Spenser in Ireland

Abstract

ABSTRACT This essay explores a range of medieval and early modern English texts, including the alliterative poem St. Erkenwald and Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene and View of the Present State of Ireland, inwhich the remains of subjugated peoples are exhumed and subsequently made to disappear. These texts, it is argued, participate in a tradition of colonial archaeology in which the cleansing of the earth is a step toward the creation of an English homeland.