The History and Topography of Ireland

Gerald of Wales's Topographia Hibernica, in John J. O'Meara's translation, is a primary twelfth century text, an Anglo-Norman cleric's account of Ireland's landscape, wonders and people written shortly after the Anglo-Norman invasion he supported. Its value as a source is that immediacy, a contemporary eyewitness and participant's description of Ireland at a specific political moment. Its limit is equally direct: Gerald wrote as an invader's chronicler with an explicit interest in portraying the Irish as barbarous and in need of Anglo-Norman and church reform, so his descriptions of Irish religious practice and character are shaped by that political purpose, and historians read the Topographia as valuable but requiring active correction for its author's evident bias rather than as neutral ethnography.