Presenter: Doug Sam
Mentor: Michael Peixoto, Honors College History
Oral Presentation
Majors: Environmental Studies and Geography
Following the twelfth-century Anglo-Norman invasion of Ireland, King Henry II of England sent Gerald of Wales to tour the newly conquered territory. Throughout his travels in Ireland, Gerald describes the land and geography
he encountered. His inclusions of environmental detail hint at the spiritual and imperial aspirations of the Norman conquerors. Using depictions of the environment from Gerald’s Topographia Hibernica (1187), with other twelfth- century narrative accounts of the natural features of the British Isles, my research explores medieval perceptions of human-environmental interactions. Focusing on the spiritual, economic, and political meanings attached to the characterization of natural objects, I show how concepts of both the real and imagined environment took on a symbolic function in depicting the worth of Ireland’s conquest. For example, Gerald writes of the “fruitful and fertile” land, yet describes that “only the granaries are without their wealth.” The Irish therefore weren’t using the land to their advantage thus, in the Anglo-Norman perspective, were primitive—conquerable. Long before the rise of the British Empire as a global power, European writers such as Gerald were already experimenting with the idea of the primitive and natural as justification to civilize and convert. This dichotomy frequently builds upon a discourse of development centered on the human and physical geography of the subaltern, thus creating a language of environmental prejudice, one that persists to the present day.