ABSTRACT
Gerald de Barri (Giraldus Cambrensis) was the first foreigner to write a book about Ireland-indeed, in the late 1180s he wrote two in swift succession, the Topographia Hibernie (Topography of Ireland) and the Expugnatio Hibernica (Invasion of Ireland), both from the standpoint of a hostile outsider. The brilliance of these two books (the most popular of all his many works) elaborated and established an idea that was already beginning to take root in intellectual circles in Europe and especially in England, the idea that the Irish were an inferior and barbarous people. So influential did Gerald’s expression of this idea become that in the seventeenth century, John Lynch was moved to write:
The wild dreams of Giraldus have been taken up by a herd of scribblers… I find the calumnies of which he is the author published in the language and writings of every nation, no new geography, no history of the world, no work on the manners and customs of different nations appearing in which his calumnious charges against the Irish are not chronicled as undoubted facts…and all these repeated again and again until the heart sickens at the sight.
