Print, rhetoric, and 'plantation,' 1571-1641

This thesis offers a new model for understanding the rise of the word plantation as a keyword of anglophone hegemony in the early seventeenth century. Generally approached as a simple (and perhaps simplistic) synonym for colony in both the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, plantation is missing from printed Elizabethan texts which promoted hegemonic settlement in Ireland and the Americas. Instead, in a colonial context, plantation rose to sudden prominence in promotional pamphlets published in 1609 and 1610, and James VUI was an active agent in this discursive shift. Tracing the word's rise to a unrecognized connection with Protestant pamphleteering from the sixteenth century, the thesis argues that plantation had taken on a distinctive association with religious reform and Protestant conceptions of divine providence by the time the word was adopted as the Jacobean name for colonial hegemony. In addition to an inherent ambiguity, the word plantation offered James a means for suggesting both classical and Christian authorities for the hegemonic enterprise - a duality that was not open to colony. More definitively than kingdom, colony, or commonwealth, the word plantation yoked the civil and the ecclesiastical, and therefore transformed the colonial promotional pamphlet into a space where monarch and subject could publicly, but indirectly, contest competing conceptions of the relationship between temporal and spiritual authority. Through rhetorical analysis which considers how the printed form itself was engaged in the making of meaning, the thesis provides a study of the colonial promotional pamphlet from 1571, when print was first used to promote a particular settlement, and 1641, when violence broke out on "plantation" lands in Ireland. It offers new readings of colonial texts by Waiter Ralegh, Francis Bacon, John Davies, John Donne, and John Cotton, as well as an examination of the rhetoric of "plantation" as it was deployed by James VI/I.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo