Foreign Soil: The Ethnography of Landscape and Imperial Imagination in the Topographia Hibernica

This article focuses on the depiction of the soil by Gerald of Wales in the Topographia Hibernica. It explores how Gerald blends topographical and ethnographic descriptions of Ireland and its people in order to construct a civilized, Christian manner of interacting with the soil and with subterranean resources. By portraying the Irish as deficient in their exploitation of Ireland’s sacred and fertile soil, Gerald constructs a rhetorical justification for conquest that links spiritual reform to agricultural reform. Associating Irish natural resources with the history of saintly miracles reframes the conquest of Ireland as a crusade to liberate a sacred landscape from the neglect shown by the contemporary Irish inhabitants. Similarly, Gerald portrays Angevin domination as divinely sanctioned through stories of miraculous subterranean emergences. The Topographia Hibernica synthesizes topographical, historical, and hagiographical traditions in order to express how the spiritual and cultural condition of a people is intertwined with their relationship to soil.