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The Monstrous Middle Ages
The Monstrous Middle Ages
The Monstrous Middle Ages
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The Monstrous Middle Ages

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The figure of the monster in medieval culture functions as a vehicle for a range of intellectual and spiritual inquiries, from questions of language and representation to issues of moral, theological and cultural value. Monsters embody cultural tensions that go far beyond the idea of the monster as simply an unintelligible and abject other. This text looks at both the representation of literal monsters and the consumption and exploitation of monstrous metaphors in a wide variety of high and late-medieval cultural productions, from travel writing and mystical texts, to sermons, manuscript illuminations and maps. Individual essays explore the ways in which monstrosity shaped the construction of gendered and racial identities, religious symbolism and social prejudice in the Middle Ages. Reading the Middle Ages through its monsters provides an opportunity to view medieval culture from fresh perspectives. It should be of interest in the concept of monstrosity and its significance for medieval cultural production.
LanguageEnglish
Release dateMay 15, 2017
ISBN9781786831750
The Monstrous Middle Ages

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    The Monstrous Middle Ages - Bettina Bildhauer

    1

    Introduction: Conceptualizing the Monstrous

    BETTINA BILDHAUER and ROBERT MILLS

    Struck with grief that in the sanctuary of God there should be foolish pictures, and what are rather misshapen monstrosities than ornaments (picturarum ineptias et deformia quedam portenta magis quam ornamenta), I wished if possible to occupy the minds and eyes of the faithful in a more comely and useful fashion. For since the eyes of our contemporaries are apt to be caught by a pleasure (uoluptate) that is not only vain, but even profane, and since I did not think it would be easy to do away altogether with the meaningless paintings in churches (inanes ecclesie pictures), especially in cathedral and parish churches, where public stations take place, I think it an excusable concession that they should enjoy at least that class of pictures which, as being the books of the laity, can suggest divine things to the unlearned, and stir up the learned to the love of the scriptures.¹

    What can we learn from monstrosities that we cannot learn elsewhere? When the author of Pictor in Carmine, an early thirteenth-century treatise on aesthetic models, prefaced his discussion with a statement denouncing the ‘foolish pictures’ and ‘misshapen monstrosities’ that inhabit cathedral and parish churches, he suggested that our medieval counterparts probably would not have gained very much from the experience.² Such depictions are portenta – deformed monstrosities – representations that are ‘not only vain, but even profane’. Moreover, the author claims that it is the ‘criminal presumption of painters that has gradually introduced these sports of fantasy, which the church ought not to have countenanced for so long’.³ The implication is that this has all been going on long enough and that it is time to put a stop to the monstrous excesses that proliferate in the sanctuary of God.⁴

    This book is about the cultural uses to which monstrosity was put in the Middle Ages, in the service of agendas that were not simply vain or frivolous or fanciful, but culturally and symbolically useful. Monsters, contributors assume, are not meaningless but meaning-laden; the monstrous is constitutive, producing the contours of both bodies that matter (humans, Christians, saints, historical figures, gendered subjects and Christ) and, ostensibly, bodies that do not (animals, non-Christians, demons, fantastical creatures and portentous freaks). Monstrosity also demarcates segments of space (for instance, by distinguishing areas of the landscape in which demonic creatures do and do not appear), and divisions of time (such as the distinction between night and day). So, where the author of Pictor in Carmine saw his contemporaries wallowing in an inane multitude of double-headed eagles, chimeric lions, absurd centaurs and preposterous headless creatures, we – the contributors to this volume – see in monsters an opportunity to view medieval culture afresh.

    J. R. R. Tolkien, in 1936, was similarly sanguine about the potential significance of monstrosity for our understanding of medieval culture. In his seminal essay ‘Beowulf: the monsters and the critics’, Tolkien roundly condemned Beowulf scholars for ‘placing the unimportant things at the centre and the important on the outer edges’, and for, in effect, judging the poem to be simply a ‘quarry of fact and fancy’.⁵ Stressing the poem’s literary and artistic merits over and above its philological and historical significance, he argued that ‘the monsters are not an inexplicable blunder of taste; they are essential, fundamentally allied to the underlying ideas of the poem, which give it its lofty tone and high seriousness’.⁶ These words had a powerful effect: by giving Beowulf’s monsters their dues, Tolkien contributed to the transformation of an entire critical tradition conceiving the poem’s literary qualities as unimportant.

    Tolkien’s argument rests itself on a perception of continuity, on the fact that Beowulf was ‘written in a language that after many centuries has still essential kinship with our own’.⁷ Such observations are based in turn on an urge to correct the impression of premodern primitivism that affected previous judgements of the poem. An analogy may be made here with the efforts of medieval historians in the twentieth century to ‘modernize’ the Middle Ages – to alter perceptions of the Middle Ages as an epoch of dark and sinister backwardness, with reference to foundational ideas like the ‘twelfth-century Renaissance’ or the medieval ‘discovery of the individual’.⁸ In the same way that Beowulf’s under-valuation as an aesthetic entity coincided with the marginalization of its monsters, so the Middle Ages has traditionally been marginalized by mainstream historiography, regarded, to borrow a phrase from Deborah Youngs and Simon Harris in this volume, as a ‘temporal monstrosity’, an aberration between antiquity and modernity.⁹ At the same time, however, just as Grendel frequents the borders of the Danish moors, the Middle Ages as a period continually threatens to disrupt modernity from its position on the edges of history: if the Middle Ages is popularly imagined as a time full of monsters, then it can also be said to operate itself as a kind of historiographic monster, challenging ideas of modernity as radically different.

    One way of showing up the threat posed by the monstrous Middle Ages, the Middle Ages as monster, would be to investigate the parallels between commonplace understandings emphasizing medieval alterity and Orientalist discourses stressing ethnic, racial and religious difference. Orientalism, in Edward Said’s formulation, is a ‘Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient’, producing the Orient as a kind of ‘surrogate and even underground self’.¹⁰ The tropes of Orientalism have been deployed explicitly in the context of attempts to delineate modern historical identities on the basis of temporal distinctions: words like ‘foreign’ and ‘alien’ can be used as markers of time as well as space, and the Middle Ages as a period is especially prone to being conceptualized in terms of such distancing epithets. But medievalism has been exploited in the service of Orientalist discourse in less scholarly contexts too, say in the context of the desire of Western media reporters to ‘rescue’ disenfranchised women from the repressive ‘medieval’ dictates of ‘third world’ men (witnessed, for instance, in the attention lately focused on practices like sati, a custom of Hindu widow sacrifice, and hijab, the Islamic veil).¹¹ As well as appropriating women in the production of cultural difference, such conflations draw on popular associations of the Middle Ages as a period of deplorable oppression; they also reinforce the link between ‘medieval’ as a temporal marker and its deployment spatially, as a signifier delineating the imagined ‘monsters’ of modernity (for instance, in reference to the ‘monstrous’ practices of contemporary non-Western cultures).¹² These understandings of the monstrous – and the medieval – suggest that they are wholly undesirable phenomena, things to be rejected at all costs. The definition of monstrosity that is produced is, as such, mainly negative: monstrosity as something to be avoided. This was the assessment of the author of Pictor in Carmine and of Beowulf critics prior to Tolkien; but it was also the view of medieval historians, who for much of the twentieth century closed their eyes to monsters as a subject worthy of serious study.¹³

    Today medieval monsters are back in fashion (in academic contexts, at least). This is the result, in part, of a marked shift in the meanings that they are understood to bear. Caroline Walker Bynum’s Metamorphosis and Identity (2001), for instance, holds up as an example for modern scholarly attitudes the ‘wonder’ with which medieval authors supposedly approached monstrosities.¹⁴ David Williams, in Deformed Discourse (1996), praises early medieval philosophy for celebrating the monstrous as an epistemological alternative to the drab rationalism of later times.¹⁵ Rosemarie Garland Thomson’s introduction to her collection Freakery (1996) even charts a linear history of monsters and freaks, from medieval tolerance and curiosity to nineteenth-century exclusion and vilification.¹⁶ This suggests that something new is going on in the field of medieval monstrosities: that monstrosity, as an interpretive framework, is also something to be desired. Two essay collections appeared in 2002 that explore the significance of monsters and marvels as a framework for investigating premodern cultures: Liz Herbert McAvoy and Teresa Walters’s Consuming Narratives, which examines the significance of monstrous appetites for concepts of gender, politics, race and nation; and Timothy S. Jones and David A. Sprunger’s Marvels, Monsters, and Miracles, which confronts perceptions of the marvellous through the interpretive lens of ‘Otherness’.¹⁷ Both volumes take the view that monstrosity in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance had the potential to be simultaneously productive of, and subversive of, hegemonic institutions and ideologies; both also suggest the desirability of a focus on monstrosities for conceptions of the present, whether in terms of the critical practices engendered by the study of premodern monsters or the continuities and differences registered by the monsters of our own (post)modern times. One of the boundaries that a focus on monstrosity arguably disrupts is that between past and present; and whereas a renewed emphasis on ‘marginal’ phenomena like monsters in medieval scholarship is lamented by scholars like Paul Freedman and Gabrielle Spiegel as contributing to ‘an emerging view of the Middle Ages as inherently pathological’, ¹⁸ a recent wave of literary medieval scholarship by the likes of Kathleen Biddick, Carolyn Dinshaw and L. O. Aranye Fradenburg has pursued the possibility of partial connection with the past, of becoming medieval in a way that produces neither hard-edged alterity nor complete identification.¹⁹ Recent publications on medieval monsters have similarly attempted to confront the dynamics of sameness and difference that monstrosities arguably provoke: Jones and Sprunger suggest that we must continue to engage with monsters and marvels of the past since, ‘by engaging our sense of wonder and our curiosity, they urge us to look into them and see ourselves’.²⁰

    Perhaps the most intelligent and thought-provoking contributions to the field of medieval monstrosities in recent years are two books, published almost two decades apart, that likewise demonstrate the importance of both historicized and theorized versions of the medieval past. John Block Friedman’s The Monstrous Races in Medieval Art and Thought (1981) and Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s Of Giants (1999) have each, in their own ways, transformed the field; each continues to exert a direct or indirect influence on the essays collected together here.²¹ Friedman’s work on medieval conceptions of geography and anthropology demonstrates that, within the medieval Christian imagination, the monstrous races believed to populate the far-flung reaches of the earth were not simply decorative embellishments or trivial exoticisms, but provocatively and problematically disturbing of divine categories and intentions; Cohen’s study of medieval representations of giants advocates a wide-ranging theoretical base for explorations of the topic, centred on concepts of postmodern identity-formation fashioned by the converging disciplines of psychoanalysis, gender studies, postcolonial studies and queer theory. Though it does not deal for the most part with medieval monstrosities, Cohen’s edited collection Monster Theory (1996) also introduces frameworks and paradigms with which many of the essays collected here engage.²² Further contributions to the rich and ever expanding field of medieval monstrosities are listed in the annotated bibliography at the end of the present volume.

    If, as the above survey suggests, the last two decades have experienced a renewed vogue for premodern monsters as the subjects of academic investigation, there is still much work to be done on the sheer variety of functions that monstrosity possessed across the centuries, and in different environments and discursive contexts. Essays here advance the subject by suggesting that monstrosity is not simply a phenomenon confined to particular visual, literary or philosophical genres: while monstrous and demonic forms are not necessarily given the same weight in sermons, saints’ lives, mystical writings, theological discussions or chronicle entries as they are in the travel writings, romances and afterlife visions around which explorations of the topic have traditionally clustered, the assumption that monsters can be located within a clearly demarcated range of contexts and functions is usefully problematized here. All our contributors betray, in their different ways, a common interest in the following basic questions. What would the cultural history of the Middle Ages look like when viewed through its monsters? What sorts of cultural work did monstrosity perform? What categories did it upset, construct or enforce? As such, the book is conceived with the belief that what, on the surface, appears to be marginal may in certain contexts turn out to be symbolically, and ideologically, central. Yet the end result produces no easy prognosis or straightforward solution to those questions: if monsters are significant for our understanding of medieval culture, they are by no means monolithically so. Monsters are polysemous entities, functioning in a wide range of situations and to a variety of ends; no singular discourse of the monstrous can be discerned in this period, and hence there can be no singular conclusion.

    Indeed, if it were possible to condense the concerns of this volume under a single heading, it would be above all in terms of its historical and geographic spread. Inevitably we cannot deliver fully on a grand title like The Monstrous Middle Ages simply because to do justice to the huge diversity of the period’s encounters with monstrosity would necessitate a book of encyclopedic proportions. Each chapter is concerned in some way with Christian, European monsters and demonizations; although many contributors refer to continental material, the overwhelming focus of the collection is the High and Late Middle Ages in Britain. Of course, other temporal and spatial horizons might also have been appropriate: it could have been useful also to feature more work on, say, early medieval monstrosity; the perspectives of those deemed ‘monstrous’ by medieval Christians; or accounts of monsters in medieval Jewish or Muslim writings. Research in these areas is important, and we regret that more cannot be offered on these subjects here.²³ But we hope that these gaps are made up for in other respects: our selection process has ensured an interdisciplinary collection, which juxtaposes historical, literary, theological and visual materials, and employs a diverse range of approaches, from history to literary studies, and from art history to folklore. The intention is to provide an insight into the sorts of materials and methods that might be deployed in scholarly investigations of the monstrous; in addition, we hope that the contents will encourage further work in this stimulating and constantly evolving area of scholarship.

    The other sections in this introductory chapter introduce some of the wider frameworks within which medieval monstrosity might be situated, and in so doing provide a context for the other essays in the volume. ‘Locating the monstrous’ introduces areas of culture associated with monstrosity in the Middle Ages, as well as considering some of the categories that monsters served to define and challenge. The survey is not exhaustive, but designed to assemble vantage points from which readers new to the topic of monstrosities may begin to form a more detailed impression of the field as it has developed in recent decades. We have also attempted, in ‘Reclaiming the monstrous’, to position medieval monsters – and the critical tradition to which they have given rise – in relation to debates currently taking place in other areas of the humanities and social sciences, notably psychoanalysis and queer theory, about identity and its construction. This account will, it is hoped, enable medievalists to come to the historical matter with fresh sets of questions; at the same time, non-medievalists will potentially benefit from the common ground that these theoretical paradigms set up.

    Locating the monstrous

    As we have already suggested, the concept of a monstrous Middle Ages – the Middle Ages as monstrous – bears comparison with colonial discourse emphasizing familiarity and difference. But this analogy with Orientalism also functions as a forceful reminder of the fact that dominant ideas about the Middle Ages have been produced on the basis of spatial as well as temporal distinctions. One of the most significant blind spots in medieval studies is the overriding restriction of its operations to western European cultures, a fact that is gradually emerging as an object of criticism in the growing convergence between postcolonial studies and medieval scholarship.²⁴ Indeed, although monsters do not feature explicitly in Said’s investigations, several scholars have implied that medieval monsters themselves might be comprehended as the products of an early colonialist mentality, a blueprint for the systematic creation of distinctions between territories, nations and peoples. While, in the twenty-first century, alien beings are more likely to be represented as inhabitants of outer space, late medieval travel literature and mappa mundi (world maps) commonly located monsters and monstrous peoples in extreme geographical locations: the East, India, Ethiopia or the Antipodean zone.²⁵ In this volume, Sarah Salih demonstrates the extent to which some of these races, encountered by ‘John Mandeville’ in perhaps the most famous of medieval travelogues, combined features that are simultaneously domestic and foreign: they are imagined as possessing reason but also strange ideas; hierarchical social order but also dog-heads. As such, for Salih, monsters like cynocephali confirm the ultimate superiority of monotheism and warrior masculinity ‘not by being worthy objects of conquest, conversion or elimination, but by being revealed as having been all along cognitive representations of the familiar’.

    But these marginal spaces between the familiar and the foreign were not just located at the edges of the earth: they could also be positioned closer to home. Stories proliferated of monstrosities at the edges of one’s village, valley or parish, beyond which lay the great unknown. Jeremy Harte’s contribution to the collection assembles a panoply of sources describing supernatural encounters with devils, demonstrating that demons lurked around more domestic borders too – that, to outsiders, the East Anglian fens were themselves ‘full of fiends’. Likewise, Michael Camille has shown elsewhere how monsters may occur at the margins of any civilized space: the margins around the texts in a manuscript folio; the portals and capitals of cathedrals, churches and monastic buildings; as well as the imagined fringes of medieval cities and courts.²⁶ By populating the zone around these social spaces with monsters, medieval craftspeople produced an array of imaginary others that created a kind of ‘Orientalism within’.²⁷ St Augustine (354–430) also discusses the possibility of ‘monstrous human births among us’, in the middle of one’s own community, and considers the implications of such births for concepts of divine creation. Debating the question of whether the monstrous races of the East are to be included in the category of ‘human’, he asserts:

    If we assume that the subjects of those remarkable accounts are in fact men, it may be suggested that God decided to create some races in this way, so that we should not suppose that the wisdom with which he fashions the physical being of men has gone astray in the case of the monsters (monstris) which are bound to be born among us of human parents; for that would be to regard the works of God’s wisdom as the products of an imperfectly skilled craftsman.²⁸

    Augustine thus deploys the monstrous races as a way of understanding, and providing justification for, the deformed ‘among us’ – the monster within.

    Yet medieval Europe’s inner monsters were not simply freaks of nature: just as monsters were commonly understood to be pagan or unreligious, non-Christians living in proximity with Christian communities could also be depicted with monstrous characteristics. Michael Uebel has suggested that twelfth-century responses to Saracen alterity were frequently expressed through the sign of monstrosity: he cites Alain of Lille’s Contra Haereticos, which describes how ‘Muhammad’s monstrous (monstruosa) life, more monstrous sect, and most monstrous end is manifestly found in his deeds’.²⁹ Moreover, in this volume, Bettina Bildhauer highlights the complex associations between monstrosity, blood and Jewish identity in medieval Christian texts: Jews, blood and monsters, she argues, all occupied positions on the margins of the normative Christian body in this period, and as such were ripe for a range of symbolic interactions.

    Medieval monsters did not just live at the edges of space and of Christendom; they were also found at the extreme ends of time. Medieval artists revelled in representations of the end of the world, an event some thought would occur in the not so distant future. The Apocalypse, Judgement Day, purgatory and hell were populated by a stunning array of monsters – the Antichrist, the seven-headed beast, the hellmouth and countless demons and devils, snatching and torturing sinful souls.³⁰ The subject of Aleks Pluskowski’s contribution to the volume is apocalyptic monstrosity: he discusses the shifts in shape and meaning that apocalyptic monsters – in particular devourers – underwent, from pagan Scandinavian literature through to late medieval Flemish iconography. But demonic creatures were also thought to exist, in their role as torturers of souls in hell, even after the end of time. Here monsters mark out a period that is both a part of history and its end, a boundary between this world and the eternity of the next. Deployed strategically by Church authorities, these monsters not only expressed and helped people to come to terms with their fears of death and of the limits of human existence, but also instigated such anxieties.³¹ Fear was a tactic deployed by the Church as a way of producing other temporal boundaries, too: Youngs and Harris here suggest that theologians and visionaries produced the night as a time of imagined horrors, constructing ‘the monstrosity of the night in order to underline the glory of the light’. Drawing analogies with David Williams’s account of the medieval interest in monstrosity as a ‘deformed discourse’, a method of knowing God through what he is not, they argue that the medieval night and visionary purgatory were constructed by the Church as a way of articulating the magnificence of heaven.³²

    At the other end of the timeline, the extreme past, monsters were given an ancestry which reached back to Adam: legends explain that monsters are the children of either Adam’s daughter, his son Cain or, after the flood, Noah’s son Ham.³³ This corresponds to a strong medieval interest in genealogy, reflecting not only the nobility’s anxieties about their origins by which they legitimated their rule, but also the need to give everything a place in the Christian history of the world as recorded in the Bible. When we consider how many modern monsters are imagined to come from prehistoric times, live in the future or attempt to bring about the destruction of the world, it seems that an anxiety about origins, a fear of death and a concern about losing the world as we know it continues to occupy viewers and readers today.

    If monsters functioned as temporal markers, they were also constitutive of the social order. Monsters encountered in distant locations were thought to possess unusual social practices. For instance, the Wonders of the East, an Anglo-Saxon text which survives in manuscripts dating from between c.970 and c.1150, describes a plethora of fabulous creatures inhabiting distant corners of the globe: at one point in the text, a race is mentioned whose male representatives generously give travellers their women before letting them continue their journeys.³⁴ Also, Pliny the Elder (d. AD 79), whose Natural History served as a source for many subsequent descriptions of monstrous races, describes the ‘Bragmanni’ or Brahmin, a group of naked wise men who spend their lives in caves, staring at the sun; a thirteenth-century bestiary in Cambridge University Library depicts the Bragmanni huddled in their cramped compound.³⁵ Monsters also often had strange eating habits: the Wonders of the East mentions the Homodubii (‘doubtful ones’), who live on raw fish; the thirteenth-century encyclopedist Thomas of Cantimpré includes in his De Naturis Rerum an account of the Astomi, a group of mouthless creatures who live by smell alone – they apparently had a particular penchant for apples.³⁶ Indeed, perhaps the most enduring image of monstrous appetite is the cannibal: a classic taboo-defying creature.³⁷ In part, stories of cannibalism are related to medieval preoccupations with bodily integrity, as witnessed in debates on whether food (for example, animal meat) becomes part of the person through ingestion.³⁸ But monsters also defined the ‘right’ choice of food and table manners, which had an important function in demarcating social groups and decorous behaviour.³⁹ Similarly monsters showed deficiencies and oddities in other areas important to the definition of conduct, such as clothing, speech and weapons. Here, the monstrous other helped to identify the very concept of courtliness. In this volume, Samantha Riches outlines ways in which medieval sanctity was similarly defined in distinction from the beasts with which saints battled, arguing that ‘the holiness of the saint is thrown into relief by the baseness of the monster that is encountered, but saintly heroism is often emphasized too’.

    Monstrous encounters could also be gendered encounters. Riches has argued elsewhere that medieval artists occasionally represented the dragon confronted by St George with female genitalia, or other gendered characteristics like breasts or dugs, as a way of symbolically reinforcing the saint’s chastity. Conquering the dragon demonstrated George’s ability to subjugate the sins of the flesh, a motif that, for Riches, resonates strongly with the themes of female virgin martyr legends.⁴⁰ Indeed this conflation of the female and the monstrous was a familiar move in medieval culture: for instance, it is a trope remarked upon by Christine de Pizan, in the opening pages of The Book of the City of Ladies (1405), where she announces that the negative perceptions of women in learned writings inspired such disgust and sadness in her that she began to despise herself and the whole of her sex as an ‘aberration in nature’.⁴¹ In modern criticism, too, attempts have been made to deconstruct the cultural links between monstrosity and femininity: Dyan Elliott, in her book Fallen Bodies (1999), contends that pollution taboos were especially significant in reinforcing woman’s alignment with the demonic, an association that ultimately set the stage for the persecution of witches; essays in the McAvoy and Walters collection discover the female body as the principal locus for the cultural inscription of monstrosity in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.⁴² Conversely, in this volume, McAvoy shows how certain medieval women could produce texts conducive to a conscious appropriation and redeployment of the monstrous: the English mystics Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe deftly undermine the conventional inscription of monstrosity on female bodies by constructing the principal site of the monstrous as an expression of the masculine.

    Gender was also deemed monstrous when the binary categories by which it was perceived broke down. In the later Middle Ages, for instance, hermaphroditism was interpreted

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