Turning the Irish into monsters. The geographical imagination of Giraldus Cambrensis

Abstract

By analyzing Topographia Hibernica, first topographical description of Ireland, written by the medieval chronicler Giraldus Cambrensis, this paper investigates how the British colonial discourse sought to legitimize the colonization of the territory turning the native inhabitants into monsters. By assigning the Irish, under the sign of abjection, all sorts of gender anomalies based on the representation of repertoires offered by medieval Teratology, Cambrensis characterized Ireland as a hotbed of monstrous sexualities and thus tries to naturalize colonization as a necessary civilizing process.

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