In April 2020, after her lectures at Maynooth University had moved online and she had swapped a Dublin flat for a house in rural Suffolk, Elizabeth Boyle sent an open letter to a group of students she thought she might not see again. In it, she wondered whether a DUP councillor’s attempt to link the emergence of Covid-19 to recent abortion legislation had reminded them of a plague which raged through Ireland in the year 664 and was interpreted by some as an act of God.
“I hope that you are putting your education to good use,” she wrote, urging them to treat current newspaper reports, press conferences and internet conspiracies as they would historical sources, as opportunities to inhabit the minds of those who live through harrowing times.
That letter might have languished in an internet blog had it not caught the attention of a publisher alive to the potential of a book-length work in which the personal, the modern and the medieval might similarly interweave. The idea obviously presented a unique and considerable challenge, which Boyle has met with unique and considerable talents.
As well as a wealth of subject-knowledge (the work ranges widely, mainly through medieval Irish literature, history and intellectual culture), there’s a strong social and political consciousness on display here, an aptitude for sharp, accessible, witty prose, and an engaging personality willing to share sometimes painful events of her own life.
In 12 chapters, each shaped around a month of 2020, Boyle sets these world events alongside personal traumas and the more mundane milestones of every life
As it turned out, Fierce Appetites is about much more than a pandemic year. 2020 was marked also by racial tensions, extremes of ideology and inequality, the removal and effacing of public statues, an increasing awareness of the relevance of pronouns. In 12 chapters, each shaped around a month of that year, Boyle sets these world events alongside personal traumas and the more mundane milestones of every life. Grief, age, relationships, ambition, guilt and addiction are all explored, as are the suddenly topical subjects of travel and confinement.
As things happen, events unfold, the author watches and writes, putting her education to good use, exploring the history and literature of the Middle Ages, sometimes finding touchpoints for her own emotions, sometimes allowing the reader simply to witness the truth of plus ça change …
In July, we are introduced to the 13th-century text Acallam na Senórach with the caveat that the author finds it “deeply tedious”. In common with that staple of medieval Irish literature, though, Fierce Appetites is organised around a kind of framing tale, the elements of autobiography providing a loose scaffold into which are slotted longer excursions into early law, grammar, poetry, tales, medicine and etymology.
‘The douchebag’
Like the Acallam, this too might have been dull stuff. That it is actually an easily digested and stimulating read has much to do with Boyle’s no-nonsense approach to the materials of her research. Not for her the indiscriminate reverence for all things old or the dated view that characters conceived in the Middle Ages are predominantly heroes and gods. In these retellings, early Irish tales are populated by “the mammy’s boy”, “the douchebag”, “the idiotic bitch”.
It is this impulse to breathe fresh air into the discipline in which she works that makes Boyle’s book more than a collection of personal essays (whatever the blurb on the back may say). As she strips away the “wooliness” which surrounds many early texts, she finds not just mammy’s boys and bitches but also a version of medieval Ireland that we rarely care to address. Whereas the likes of Yeats and Synge portrayed a tragic heroine at the centre of the “Deirdre Story”, Boyle returns to the original Irish-language tale to reveal a woman earmarked as a sex-slave and passed between powerful men.
It serves also as an invaluable corrective lens to the still-influential view that Ireland's past was an age of happy innocence, an outpost trading with the Otherworld
Elsewhere, the book confronts head-on medieval Ireland’s history of slavery, prejudice, abuse, haves and have-nots. Much of this resonates with modern-day issues, of course, but it serves also as an invaluable corrective lens to the still-influential view that Ireland’s past was an age of happy innocence, an outpost trading with the Otherworld, an oral culture with pagan roots. With characteristic precision and punch, Boyle demolishes thinking of that kind into “a mush of non-history with an Enya soundtrack”.
Fierce Appetites is an unusual, arresting and genuinely enriching book. With such a diverse work, it was probably inevitable that the look and promotion of the finished product would pick up on certain aspects of its content in preference to others.
That said, the academic in me cannot quite suppress a sense of regret that the title and cover image (which features a medieval couple in a romantic clinch) somewhat belie the fact that the fiercest appetite in evidence is one for learning; the not-infrequent references to sex, drugs and death metal merely confirm Ireland’s long history of producing fierce and unconventional scholars.
Sharon Arbuthnot combines research in medieval Irish language and lexicography with public engagement activities, mainly on behalf of the historical dictionary of Irish (eDIL)
