ABSTRACT
I shall thus be considering the question of whether Gerald's Topographia was a source for Chaucer's House of Fame, and it may be helpful to define here the term 'source' as I understand it, while at the same time recalling the definitions of 'analogies' and 'analogues' given in the last chapter. What those two definitions amount to is that analogies are apparently coincidental similarities between texts, while analogues are texts which, to judge from similarities between them, appear to derive independently of each other from a common original. Sources, I would now suggest, are oral or written traditions which a writer-in this case Chaucer -may reasonably be thought either to have drawn on directly, or to have been influenced by, at one or more removes, through a direct line of transmission. 1
In the second section of this chapter I shall draw attention to certain similarities, as I see them, between Gerald's Topographia and Chaucer's House of Fame, and will raise the question of whether they are such as to suggest that Chaucer knew the Topographia, which if so would have been one ofhis sources in writing that poem. In the third section I shall consider whether the similarities suggest rather that the two works derived independently of one another from the same source, in which case they would be analogues to one another. This will make it necessary to consider also the question of whether Chaucer visited Ireland, since, for reasons to be explained, the source envisaged in this context is an oral one relating to St Brigid of Kildare, and Chaucer
is more likely to have encountered such a source in Ireland than anywhere else. The question of whether Chaucer did indeed visit Ireland will thus be the subject of the fourth section of the chapter, and a brief conclusion will be drawn in the fifth.
