SOURCE: “Acts and Monuments of an Unelected Nation: The Cailleach Writes about the Renaissance,” in Southern Review, Vol. 31, No. 3, Summer, 1995, pp. 570-80.

In the following essay, Ní Chuilleanáin discusses the writers and historical events that have influenced her writing.

I work in an institution founded by Queen Elizabeth I, though not much about its appearance now suggests that she and her colonial advisers, and not the cool philosophers and raging politicians of the eighteenth century, were the originators. Because my work as teacher and researcher is mostly connected with the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, it frequently occurs to me to think about the founders and to reflect that I am just the person they meant to keep outside the walls—we still do have high, rather impressive stone walls with dangerous spiked railings on top.

A Gaelic-speaking¹ female papist whose direct and indirect ancestors, men and women...