Monstrous Races in the Medieval English Psalter World Map

Abstract

This article examines medieval Monstrous Races in the Psalter World Map from the thirteenth-century English Map Psalter (British Library, Add. MS 28681). It suggests the map’s reading as a pictorial expression of liminality situated in a to- and fro-ing between conceptions of Us/the Self and Them/the Other. I consider how the map exiles the Monstrous Races through spatially articulated geographical distance; inserts Them into notions of Us via inclusion in God’s salvation plan; and gestures towards a category crisis in the Us-Them divide by celebrating England’s own peripheral placement on the mappa mundi’s border. The border-space which constitutes the nexus of my investigation extends to encompass the Psalter World Map’s materiality and the self-definition by means of difference enacted by the reader-viewer in corporeal terms.