A Bardic Pickup Artist: Courtly Seduction Lesson or Parodic Play?

This essay, a revised version of the Eolas lecture delivered at the 59th International Congress on Medieval Studies in 2024, ventures into the arena of early modern Irish love poetry to make the case for the value and pleasure of close reading. Taking up Laoiseach Mac an Bhaird’s Tuirseach sin, a mhacaoimh mná [Weary it is, my lady] (c. 1600), I argue that close attention to the short poem’s diction and rhetorical moves yields both pleasure and insight into the subtlety and wit of the genre and its practitioners. To make my case, I read Mac an Bhaird’s seeming seduction poem in light of contemporary “Pickup Artist” discourse, a deeply misogynistic practice which similarly attempts to manipulate women into bed. As the poem unfolds, the rhetoric escalates to an ever-more-intense set of pressures on the targeted young woman. Yet ultimately, I show that the manipulation is as much of the clichés of the genre (and of gender relations) themselves, vindicating author, genre, and practice as more sophisticated and arguably more delightful for audiences then and now than we may have initially grasped.