Lexico-grammatical portraits of vulnerable women in war

Abstract

The 1641 Depositions are testimonies collected from (mainly Protestant) witnesses documenting their experiences of the Irish uprising that began in October 1641. As news spread across Europe of the events unfolding in Ireland, reports of violence against women became central to the ideological construction of the barbarism of the Catholic rebels. Against a backdrop of women's subordination and firmly defined gender roles, this article investigates the representation of women in the Depositions, creating what we have termed "lexico-grammatical portraits" of particular categories of woman. In line with other research dealing with discursive constructions in seventeenth-century texts, a corpus-assisted discourse analytical approach is taken. Adopting the assumptions of Critical Discourse Analysis, the discussion is extended to what the findings reveal about representations of the roles of women, both in the reported events and in relation to the dehumanisation of the enemy in atrocity propaganda more generally.

Alfredian Press on the Vikings

“…Although all three units can be taken into account, in recent applications of CDA to historical texts (such as Wood 2004 on Margaret Paston’s letters, Prentice & Hardie 2009 on London press reporting of the Glencairn Uprising of 1653-1654, and MacLeod & Fennell 2012 on Protestant testimonies documenting the Irish uprising of 1641), personal reference, the ways in which ethnic and social labels collocate and describe the relevant in- and outgroups play a particularly prominent role. In the present study I also limit my discussion of referential units to personal terms, partly because these references are the most frequent and thus easy to evaluate statistically.…”

The language of “Ribbonmen”: A CDA approach to identity construction in nineteenth-century Irish English threatening notices

“…CDA, and more specifically the discourse-historical approach (DHA) as proposed by Wodak (2001), has been successfully applied to the study of out-group and in-group identities during periods of unrest in the more distant past. Prentice and Hardy (2009), for example, analysed processes of empowerment and disempowerment in the Glencairn uprising in Scotland 1653, andMacLeod (2012) and MacLeod and Fennel (2012) investigated identity-construction in the 1641 depositions.…”