‘Their lamentable hone’

This chapter examines the sounds and voices of caoineadh (keen), an Irish Gaelic form of lament, associated with performance by women as part of the burial process and with the female expression of political protest. It opens with a study of the sounds of caoineadh, setting non-Gaelic, often travellers’ accounts, from the 1570s through to the 1770s, in context with the genre’s long-established formal conventions of metre, rhyme, and theme. This is grounded in a critical history of the genre and illustrated with examples from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Questions of oral transmission, performance, textual authority, and authenticity are crucial to the history of the surviving texts and, therefore, central to the discussion.