Monstrous Middle Ages

by Bettina Bildhauer (Editor), Robert Mills (Editor)

Overview

The monster pops up in a variety of contexts and performs various functions in medieval culture acting, most often, as a metaphor. These ten essays examine the 'meaning- laden ' monsters of the High and Late Middle Ages and the cultural uses of monstrosity within different agendas. The essays show that whereas the monster may appear on the surface to be a marginal entity in manuscript illuminations and various writings, it is in fact symbolically and ideologically central to many aspects of medieval culture often with gender, ethnic and religious connotations. Essays include Jesus as Monster (Robert Mills) ; Blood, Jews and Monsters in medieval culture (Bettina Bildhauer) ; Demonizing the night in medieval Europe (D Youngs and S Harris) ; Apocalyptic Monsters (A Pluskowski) .

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780708318225
Publisher:	University of Wales Press
Publication date:	11/28/2003
Series:	University of Wales Press - Political Philosophy Now Ser.
Pages:	236
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Robert Mills is a reader in medieval art at University College London. He is the author of Suspended Animation: Pain, Pleasure and Punishment in Medieval Culture and coeditor of Rethinking Medieval Translation: Ethics, Politics, Theory.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 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.

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. 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'. 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.

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'. 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'. 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'. 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'. 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. 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'. 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). 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). 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.

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. 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. 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. 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'. 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"', 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. 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'.

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. 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. 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. 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.

(Continues…)

---

Excerpted from "The Monstrous Middle Ages"
by .
Copyright © 2003 The Contributors.
Excerpted by permission of University of Wales Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

---

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations, vii,
Acknowledgements, ix,
Notes on Contributors, xi,
Abbreviations, xiv,
1. Introduction: Conceptualizing the Monstrous Bettina Bildhauer and Robert Mills, 1,
2. Jesus as Monster Robert Mills, 28,
3. Monstrous Masculinities in Julian of Norwich's A Revelation of Love and The Book of Margery Kempe Liz Herbert Mcavoy, 55,
4. Blood, Jews and Monsters in Medieval Culture Bettina Bildhauer, 75,
5. The Other Close at Hand: Gerald of Wales and the 'Marvels of the West' Asa Simon Mittman, 97,
6. Idols and Simulacra: Paganity, Hybridity and Representation in Mandeville's Travels Sarah Salih, 113,
7. Demonizing the Night in Medieval Europe: A Temporal Monstrosity? Deborah Youngs and Simon Harris, 134,
8. Apocalyptic Monsters: Animal Inspirations for the Iconography of Medieval North European Devourers Aleks Pluskowski, 155,
9. Hell on Earth: Encountering Devils in the Medieval Landscape Jeremy Harte, 177,
10. Encountering the Monstrous: Saints and Dragons in Medieval Thought Samantha J. E. Riches, 196,
Further Reading, 219,
Index, 227,