Monstrous Races Research Articles

Monstrous Races in the Medieval English Psalter World Map

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.

Cultural Encounter, Race, and a Humanist Ideology of Empire in the Art of Trecento Venice

Cultural Encounter, Race, and a Humanist Ideology of Empire in the Art of Trecento Venice

In search of monsters. Mythical peoples in the chronicles of the discovery and conquest of America and Siberia in the late XV — early XVII centuries

The article examines the construction of the images of “the other” and “otherness” through the introduction of mythical peoples with monstrous features of Classical Antiquity and the Bible in the chronicles of the conquest and exploration of America and Siberia in the late XV - early XVII centuries. The emphasis is made on the common elements in viewing “the other” by the Spanish and Russian chroniclers which have origins in the works of Greek and Roman authors and in the Christian exegesis of the Old and New Testaments. They include the following features: attribution of animal characteristics and “anomalous” behavior (in the eyes of chroniclers) to indigenous peoples of America and Siberia, their identification with monstrous races of Classical authors and the Bible, and correlation between the presence of monstrous peoples and fabulous riches, which was the main reason to gather all the available information about them in distant lands.

The Shape of Sex: Nonbinary Gender from Genesis to the Renaissance

The Shape of Sex: Nonbinary Gender from Genesis to the Renaissance

Otherness on the Hereford World Map (c. 1300)

This study examines the Hereford World Map (c. 1300) in relation to modern theoretical concepts of Otherness and marginality to expose disjunctions between medieval and modern ideologies. As an authoritative synthesis of Classical geographical learning and Christian theological beliefs, the landmasses, islands, and waterways of the Hereford Map are populated by hundreds of tiny icons and inscriptions that represent the world’s cities, biblical and mythological characters, animals, birds, monsters, and more. Among these are many identifiable Others, whose cartographical locations do not fit easily into modern theoretical frameworks but rather signal more complex relationships between Us and Them, and between centre and periphery; especially in England, where the Map was made and displayed. Moreover, Otherness on the Hereford Map is performed not only by the usual actors - the so-called Monstrous Races and non-Christian outgroups-but also by the divine personages dispensing justice in the celestial space depicted at its summit. My analysis of selected imagery reveals that certain of the Map’s figures and places commonly identified by modern critics as marginal in fact lay at the conceptual centre of medieval Christian identity. Moving away from the centre - margins paradigm, I also examine how medieval cartographical strategies of alignment, juxtaposition, and directionality enhanced the work’s didactic value for medieval pilgrims, and I identify examples of lessons that were retrievable with or without the assistance of cathedral guides acting as interpretative intermediaries. I conclude that the presence of Others on the Hereford Map helped medieval viewers locate themselves in its geographical spaces and in its Christian worldview, which suggests that the theoretical concept of Otherness remains a viable tool for expanding our understanding of the cultural and ideological complexities of medieval mappae mundi.

Domenico Agostini. “Half-human and monstrous races in Zoroastrian tradition”

Domenico Agostini. “Half-human and monstrous races in Zoroastrian tradition”

Sarmaci i Popianie. Dziedzictwo średniowiecznego obrazu świata jako element kontekstu kulturowego piśmiennictwa staropolskiego

Artykuł podejmuje stosunkowo słabo zbadane zagadnienie średniowiecznych wpływów na staropolskie wyobrażenia o świecie jako przestrzeni geograficznej. Ma charakter uwag wstępnych, wskazujących główne obszary obecności elementów należących do dziedzictwa myśli średniowiecznej w tekstach autorów staropolskich, które w dalszych pracach należałoby zanalizować na przykładach konkretnych utworów i/lub gatunków piśmiennictwa. Zwrócono uwagę na fakt, że szereg wyobrażeń antycznych obecnych w analizowanym okresie było wspólne dla geografii kreacyjnej średniowiecza i okresu nowożytnego. Do wskazanych jako najistotniejsze post-średniowiecznych elementów staropolskiej geografii kreacyjnej należały: ogólna wizja struktury świata fizycznego, koncepcja trójdzielnej ekumeny, posługiwanie się antyczną geonimią do opisu świata współczesnego (ze szczególnym uwzględnieniem nazwy Sarmacja), wyobrażenia na temat egzotycznych ludów i zwierząt, w tym mirabiliów, tzw. ludów monstrualnych oraz królestwa Prezbitera/Popa Jana.

Half-human and Monstrous Races in Zoroastrian Tradition


 
 
 Legends and stories about fabulous races that dwelt in India or in Africa circulated in Iran probably since the Achaemenid times. Unfortunately, scholarship on this topic has neglected some late Iranian and, especially, Zoroastrian sources, such as Draxt ī āsūrīg (The Assyrian tree), the Bundahišn (Primal Creation), the Ayādgār ī Jāmāspīg (The memorial of Jāmāsp), and the New Persian epic Šāhnāme. This article examines the aforementioned sources and discusses their accounts of five fabulous races from an Iranian, and especially Zoroastrian, perspective and through a comparative approach to some similar neighboring traditions.
 
 

Holy Monsters, Sacred Grotesques: Monstrosity and Religion in Europe and the United States by Michael E. Heyes

Reviewed by: Holy Monsters, Sacred Grotesques: Monstrosity and Religion in Europe and the United States by Michael E. Heyes Justin Mullis Michael E. Heyes, Justin Mullis, United States, Europe, Monster Studies, Medieval, race, religious studies, Middle Ages, gothic michael e. heyes, ed. Holy Monsters, Sacred Grotesques: Monstrosity and Religion in Europe and the United States. Lanham, Md. and London: Lexington Books, 2018. Pp. xxii + 268. In his introduction to Holy Monsters, Sacred Grotesques: Monstrosity and Religion in Europe and the United States, editor Michael E. Heyes states three objectives he aims to achieve with this new collection of academic essays. The first is to continue expanding the field of monster studies by moving it beyond the Middle Ages; the historical period it is most commonly associated with. The second is to move the field of monster studies beyond the discourse of the dominant social class, giving greater consideration to the voices of minorities. The third and final is to incorporate the subject of religion into the field of monster studies—a component which Heyes speculates is lacking due to the fraught relationship between religion and modernity. One way of evaluating an anthology like Holy Monsters, Sacred Grotesques is to ask how well it accomplishes these stated goals. Despite the expressed desire to move monster studies out of the dark ages, exactly half of the ten essays presented in this collection concern the medieval period. However, it is also these chapters which do the best job of meeting the second and third of Heyes's stated goals. Minji Lee's "The Woman's Body, In-Between" looks at the monstrosity of childbirth in medieval medical texts and considers how female writers at the time responded to such conceptions, often using the holy figure of the Virgin Mary as a counterpoint. Thomas S. Franke's "Miracles and Monsters" examines the fourteenth-century Catalan Atlas, a map detailing the Christian apocalypse. Because the maker of the Catalan Atlas, Abraham Cresques, was Jewish, Franke considers how this particular atlas uses various coded symbols to critique the rampant anti-Semitism of Christian eschatology. In a similar vein, John Block Friedman's "Dressing Monstrous Men" reflects on a set of Danish church wall paintings, which depict traditional monstrous races—Cynocephalus, Monoculus, Scipodes, etc.—wearing the clothes of the oppressive landsknechte, as a not at all subtle critique of these mercenary foot soldiers. More conventional is Susanne Margarit McColeman's architectural [End Page 480] examination of the role played by humorous grotesques in otherwise solemn church spaces. Finally, Cathleen McKague's "Twelfth Night's 'poor monster'" looks at the hermaphroditic character of Viola/Cesario as an unexpected messianic figure. Though limited in historical scope the majority of this first set of essays does a commendable job of finding ways to bring both minority voices and religion into the discussion of monster studies. Conversely, the second set of essays concerning "Monstrous Modernity" drift further afield. William Shakespeare proves to be a figure that straddles the boundary between the Middle Ages and the modern world, as John W. Ellis-Etchison's essay opens this section with a consideration of how the Bard and other writers depicted corrupt political power as monstrous. Etchison's subject's relevance to the stated goals of this collection is tenuous—he briefly touches on the idea of corrupt rulers as religious portents—but it is not as out of place as Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock's "Lovecraft's Things," which examines how the influential early-twentieth-century American writer reinterpreted the classic tropes of Gothic literature for his sci-fi horror tales. While this is a good piece of literary criticism, what exactly it is doing in a collection aimed at addressing Lovecraft was both a racist and an atheist is a mystery. Also featured are two essays dealing with contemporary horror television series. Linda C. Ceriello looks at the identity-politics of the overanalyzed Buffy the Vampire Slayer, while editor Heyes's own work examines the Buffy-like Sleepy Hollow. Heyes's exploration of the themes of American civil religion in Sleepy Hollow—a show that conflates the American Revolution with the biblical Book of Revelation—at least meets one of the anthology's...

A late medieval tribute to God the Creator: the geographical compendium in the Llibre vermell (Library of Montserrat, Barcelona, MS 1, ff. 68r–70r)

The so-called Llibre vermell is a late medieval miscellaneous codex that contains theological and devotional texts thought to have been intended for the spiritual instruction of pilgrims traveling to the monastery of Montserrat, near Barcelona in Spain. It includes a geographical compendium (ff. 68r–70r) dating from c.1400. Devoted to the creation of the world, its folios are illustrated with a mappa mundi, an image of God embracing and blessing the universe, and depictions of monstrous races. Although the Llibre vermell is one of the Catalan medieval manuscripts to have aroused particular interest among scholars, its geographical compendium has barely been studied; and yet, as this article shows, it holds a unique place in the context of medieval art and cartography. Its text is here fully transcribed and translated for the first time, revealing the close relationship between the compendium’s words and pictures. An in-depth analysis of the map and its portrayal of the known universe shows that, despite the apparently schematic form of these diagrams, far from retaining the archaic characteristics of earlier works—as has previously been asserted—this medieval compendium is absolutely steeped in the tradition of nautical cartography developed in the Crown of Aragon in the late Middle Ages. As well as providing a detailed analysis of the compendium’s contents and setting the work in its historical context, this article also explores the possible ways in which a putative nautical model may have reached the Montserrat scriptorium.

Are the ‘monstrous races’ races?

This essay considers the use of the modern term ‘monstrous races’ to describe the wondrous beings found in Herodotus, Pliny, The Wonders of the East, world maps and elsewhere. Considering the etymology and history of the word ‘race,’ a series of modern definitions are tested out on figures found in the images and texts of the British Library MS Harley 3954 Book of John Mandeville, the BL MS Tiberius B.v Marvels of the East, The King of Tars, Cursor Mundi and other medieval sources. The essay questions whether the term, often rooted in modern notions about the fixity of divisions of peoples, is helpful for describing medieval concepts. The essay further explores how the term ‘monstrous races’ reifies the culture of the medieval authors and illuminators – often in practice ‘white’ European Christians – as a ‘race,’ and implicitly, if unintentionally, elevates this group as normative.

The Ashgate Research Companion to Monsters and the Monstrous (Asa Simon Mittman and Peter J. Dendle, eds.)

<i>The Ashgate Research Companion to Monsters and the Monstrous</i> (Asa Simon Mittman and Peter J. Dendle, eds.)

The Mongols, Eastern Europe, and Western Europe: The Mirabilia Tradition in Benedict of Poland's Historia Tartarorum and John of Plano Carpini's Historia Mongalorum

AbstractJohn of Plano Carpini's Historia Mongalorum and Benedict of Poland's Historia Tartarorum were inspired by the Marvels of the East tradition recorded in, respectively, Italy and Poland in Latin. Historia de proellis was a text that influenced Polish scholars the most, and it was ultimately translated into Polish in the 16th century. The first translator was Leonard of Bończa, and the other, more competent, translator remains anonymous. Particularly, the later 1550 version focuses on the monstrous races of India. The two ethnographic relations about the 1247 papal mission to the Tartars must have used similar sources when they related the existence of dog heads and other monstrous races in the Tartar territory. The friars' orientalism was more intellectual than ideological, and it was an impediment in their empirical cognition of the East.

Introduction

Introduction

A Neglected Type of Medieval Mappamundi and Its Re-imaging in the Mare Historiarum (BnF MS Lat. 4915, Fol. 26v)

The article traces the history of an unstudied type of medieval world map, the so-called “V-insquare” mappamundi. These maps are shown to have their origin as an attempt to illustrate one sentence in Isidore’s Etymologiae, while ignoring the rest of Isidore’s description of the world. Attention is then focused on a dramatic three-dimensional artistic re-imaging of this map in a manuscript of the Mare historiarum, a universal history by Giovanni Colonna (1298–ca. 1340), which was painted in 1447–1455 by the Master of Jouvenel des Ursins (Paris, BnF, MS lat. 4915). This map includes depictions the monstrous races in Asia and Africa, and represents a remarkably ethnocentric vision of the world. Evidence is presented that the map was inspired by an illustrated manuscript of Raoul de Presles’s French translation of Augustine’s De civitate Dei. The V-in-square format was probably chosen to render the world as a monogram of the manuscript’s patron, Guillaume Jouvenel des Ursins.

The Discovery of Mankind: Atlantic Encounters in the Age of Columbus (review)

Reviewed by: The Discovery of Mankind: Atlantic Encounters in the Age of Columbus W. Jeffrey Bolster The Discovery of Mankind: Atlantic Encounters in the Age of Columbus. By David Abulafia . New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2008. 408 pp. $35.00 (cloth); $25.95 (paper). In what is simultaneously a social and intellectual history of the highest order, David Abulafia has reconstructed the heretofore veiled tale of Renaissance Europeans' virtual extirpation of isolated peoples in [End Page 601] the Atlantic world. Of course, the bold outlines of the story have been known for centuries. Canary Islanders, then Taino and Carib people in the Caribbean, and finally the Tupinambá of coastal Brazil were all decimated by European conquerors armed with scripture and steel, and unwittingly accompanied by disease. Abulafia's lucid and encyclopedic account, however, restores the wonder of those encounters, which "opened the eyes of Europeans to a vast range of practices and beliefs that no one had previously suspected to exist" (p. 4). Given that myths of dog-headed people, mouthless people, pygmies, wild men, and other monstrous races had circulated in Europe since classical times, it might be assumed that explorers would take any sort of encounter in stride. As Abulafia shows in painstaking detail, however, European mariners were shocked to discover Stone Age people whose appearance and morality were strikingly different, people who unashamedly wore no clothes, who occasionally ate each other, and who had never heard of Christ or Moses or Mohammed. As encounters went from the imaginary to the actual, first in the eastern Atlantic, then in the western Atlantic and along the shores of Atlantic South America, a set of thorny and intractable questions came to the fore. Why had God allowed such people to fester without his word since the crucifixion? Were those people also Adam's descendants, sharing a common lineage with the nations of the Old World? Or were they a separate creation—not fully human? And in light of the conflicted teaching of Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas, did such people have the right to be free? Could they govern themselves? Could they know God? What obligations did Christians have to such people, and how could those obligations be squared with conquerors' greed? The book reconstructs those conversations in all of their audacity, conversations among clerics, intellectuals, attorneys, and seamen. As Abulafia sees it, two criteria set apart the encounters between 1341 (the first known landing by European sailors in the Canary Islands) and 1520 (when Cortez stumbled upon the Aztecs' sophisticated and extensive empire in Mexico). One criterion was distinctiveness from the known world. In this sense, encounters in the Canaries and the Caribbean were dramatically different than those in Africa or Asia, which, however remote, were nonetheless part of a geographic continuum familiar to Europeans. The second criterion was primitiveness. In the Canaries, the Caribbean, and the coast of Brazil European sailors confronted Neolithic societies vastly different in scope and scale from those of Aztecs, Incas, Asians, and Africans. This history is thus defined temporally by 1341 and 1520, though the author's familiarity [End Page 602] with classical texts allows him to situate the encounters he examines in light of a longstanding European intellectual inheritance. In the simplest sense the book is about the enlargement of Europeans' horizons, both geographic horizons, and—more especially—mental horizons. In twenty-three compelling chapters (actually twenty-two chapters and a conclusion) Abulafia provides a nuanced exploration of each locality, Europeans' discoveries there, and the questions and consequences that followed. One of his most impressive accomplishments is the sense of newness associated with what is, after all, a very old tale. The freshness originates in the author's erudition, his conversancy with classical and Renaissance history, and his reliance on recent findings in archaeology and anthropology. In his provocatively titled chapter "Turtles, Shamans, and Snorting Tubes," for instance, he provides an insightful textual exegesis of the first European book written on the soil of the Americas, a tract by Fray Ramón Pané about the mythological and sacred world of the Taíno on the island of Hispaniola. Pané was not an intellectual. And he wrote in service of the church...

After an imaginary slumber: visual and verbal imagery of ‘awakening’ Africa

After an imaginary slumber: visual and verbal imagery of ‘awakening’ Africa

Monstrous Births and Visual Culture in Sixteenth-Century Germany (review)

Reviewed by: Monstrous Births and Visual Culture in Sixteenth-Century Germany Michelle Smith Spinks, Jennifer, Monstrous Births and Visual Culture in Sixteenth-Century Germany (Religious Cultures in the Early Modern World, 5), London, Pickering and Chatto, 2009; hardback; pp. 224; 66 b/w illustrations; R.R.P. $US99.00, £60.00; ISBN 9781851966301. Tales of monstrous births were well known across Europe in the late medieval and early modern period. They were used symbolically by authors in a variety of media to 'represent and debate issues of morality, religion and politics' (p. 3). Curiously, there were more printed references in Germany than anywhere else, which suggests something other than a passing interest. Jennifer Spinks examines a number of illustrated printed publications, such as broadsheets, pamphlets and books, which appeared in sixteenth-century Germany. Beginning with instances of monstrous births in the late fifteenth century, she maps the development of such material across the Reformation, finally ending her discussion in the late sixteenth century. Central to her argument are the religious conflicts of the Reformation and early Counter-Reformation, and the role the resultant polemical propaganda played in promoting a visual culture grounded in natural and unnatural occurrences. In a world shaken to the core by religious disorder, monstrous births and other such phenomena were used didactically and apocalyptically: they were understood as messages from a God who was unhappy with the moral state of that world. Spinks begins by briefly outlining classical and early Christian ideas of monstrous births, before leading the reader to the sixteenth century where there is a 'rich array of visual and textual materials for understanding natural wonders and prodigies … [and which are] best encountered through illustrated print catalogues' (p. 8). This cultural history is laid out chronologically within a structure that analyses specific types of printed material – from crude woodcuts to sophisticated texts – together. The central focus is the positive and negative meanings which sixteenth-century people gave to monstrous births and how we, as modern historians, can access those meanings through a close analysis of this printed material. Spinks argues that her discussion 'places considerably more weight than any previous study on the positive interpretations given to monstrous births in the period immediately preceding the Reformation' (p. 10). Furthermore, she claims the evidence points to a marked increase in negative and apocalyptic interpretations which peaked mid-century. Different meanings were now being attached to monstrous [End Page 255] births in order to interpret emerging topics of concern. Travel narratives brought tales of monstrous races home to local audiences prior to the sixteenth century. Chapter 1 briefly discusses such travel literature, the visual effect it had on audiences, and the mentalities that developed with regard to those living on the outer edges of the world. Medieval imagery saw the idea of monstrous races and monstrous births as one body, as exemplified in John Mandeville's Travels. However, by the sixteenth century, monstrous births came to be seen as unique and unrelated to those marginalized races. Spinks analyses what she calls the 'culture of prodigies' (p. 23) that emerged during the reign of Maximilian I, and how the emperor used wondrous signs and monstrous births for political ends. The remainder of the chapter examines Sebastian Brant's broadsheets that brought the representation of monstrous births to a wider audience through an appealing combination of words and images, and paved the way for the outpouring of works seen during the sixteenth century. Chapter 2 places images of monstrous births firmly within the expanding visual culture of the early sixteenth century. Using the work of Albrecht Dürer and Hans Burgkmair the Elder, Spinks outlines the varying methods and approaches used to construct images of monstrous births that resulted in more naturalistic dimensions to artists' illustrations. Chapter 3 examines the images of the Monk Calf and the Papal Ass in the polemic pamphlets of Martin Luther and Philipp Melanchthon where they used the images as allegories of the Catholic Church. As Spinks argues, monstrous bodies 'became texts to be read and argumentatively decoded using highly visual language' (p. 11). Chapter 4 demonstrates that, by mid-century, there was an increase in the number of books that focused on...

The discovery of mankind: Atlantic encounters in the age of Columbus

A new and fascinating perspective on the earliest phases of European exploration across the Atlantic Ocean The first landings in the Atlantic World generated striking and terrifying impressions of unknown peoples who were entirely foreign to anything in European explorers' experience. From the first recorded encounters with the native inhabitants of the Canary Islands in 1341 to Columbus's explorations in 1492 and Cabral's discovery of Brazil in 1500, western Europeans struggled to make sense of the existence of the peoples they met. Were they Adam's children, of a common lineage with the peoples of the Old World, or were they a separate creation, the monstrous races of medieval legend? Should they govern themselves? Did they have the right to be free? Did they know God? Could they know God? Emphasizing contact between peoples rather than the discovery of lands, and using archaeological findings as well as eyewitness accounts, David Abulafia explores the social lives of the New World inhabitants, the motivations and tensions of the first transactions with Europeans, and the swift transmutation of wonder to vicious exploitation. Lucid, readable, and scrupulously researched, this is a work of humane engagement with a period in which a tragically violent standard was set for European conquest across the world.

Monstrous Alterity in Early Modern Travel Accounts: Lessons from the Ambiguous Medieval Discourse on Humanness

When early modern explorers encountered new peoples, medieval notions of difference, passed down through verbal and pictorial maps, shaped their perceptions. Pre-modern ideas of monstrous races and a vibrant medieval discourse on what constitutes a human paved the way for eventual questioning of the status of indigenous peoples.