Customer Reviews

The History and Topography of Ireland (Penguin Classics)

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Have you ever seen a medieval map? People had only the vaguest idea of the world they lived in - and when men such as Gerald of Wales set out to gather information they very often had to rely on what local people told them (as did Herodotus over 1000 years earlier). So of course Gerald's History and Topography of Ireland is going to be riddled with factual errors - if you want to find out about the history and geography of Ireland you should look at modern maps, produced by satellites, and modern histories, written by scholars with hundreds of thousands of documents at their fingertips. Books written in the eleventh century tell you what people thought THEN, in the eleventh century, and are as such fascinating journeys into the early medieval mindset. Myths mingle with facts as the locals tell Gerald about things that matter to them, and really brings home history - in a way that reading of battles and kings doesn't. It tells you about daily lives and what people thought - we are really quite amazingly lucky that books such as these have survived a thousand years to tell us what life was like then.

Interesting primary resource for the 12th century. Had to read this for my history class and of all the books that were on the list, I'm glad I chose this one. Some tall tales and funny accounts but not a bad read to have to do a paper on.

I found the chapters relating ot the topography of Ireland to be seriously flawed and containing inaccurate descriptions of the rivers and areas of Ireland. However it does give a very good idea of the mindset of the early Norman invaders in their conquest of Ireland and offers some to moder day readers humourous rhetorical accounts of native Irish tribal behaviour.