Monstrous Races Research Articles

Una nación de monstruos. Occidente, los cinocéfalos y las paradojas del lenguaje

Entre todas las razas monstruosas que pueblan el ‘alla lejano’, los cinocefalos ocupan un lugar destacado en el imaginario europeo, gracias a su relacion privilegiada con el lenguaje. Ya en la Grecia antigua los humanos-canidos representan los intermediarios miti- cos entre la palabra humana y el verso animal. Esa tradicion se desarrolla en dos direcciones diferentes: por un lado el cristianismo medieval (influenciado tambien por leyendas chinas y mongolas) fomenta la vision de los habitantes de las fronteras remotas de la tierra como pueblos barbaros –en cuanto incapaces de elaborar un idioma propiamente humano- y demoniacos, bandidos de la humanidad. Por el otro lado el humanismo renacentista, siguiendo la escuela cinica, retoma el sujeto de seres mitad perros y mitad humanos para abordar las paradojas del lenguaje. La cuestion de la comprension linguistica con las gentes del Alter Orbis se vuelve un problema de candente actualidad en el curso de la Conquista. Asistimos, entonces, al paso de un imaginario relacionado con el mundo canino a lo relacionado con lo salvaje simiesco: un sintoma de cambios profundos en la comunicacion entre centro y periferia del mundo. El cinocefalo, el sabio mediador, es remplazado por la simia, imitadora parodica de la expresion humana.

Maps of medieval thought: the Hereford paradigm

Part I The Circle as a Conceptual Device The Cosmological Wheel Part II The Hereford Map as a Conceptual Device The Frame as time, The Medieval Audience Part III The Hereford Map and its Worlds The World of Animals, The World of Strange and Monstrous Races, The World of Alexander, The World of the Bible and the Crusades Part IV The Hereford Map in Cartographic Context A Comparison of Frameworks

"These are people who eat raw fish": Contours of the Ethnographic Imagination in the Sixteenth Century

'These are people who eat raw fish': Contours of the Ethnographic Imagination in the Sixteenth Century. There was no ethnography as such in the sixteenth century, but there was an imagination. The present case study deals with what would now be classified as ethnographic information, though embedded visually and textually in the manuscripts compiled in the last quarter of the sixteenth century by Adriaen Coenen, a Dutch beachcomber. Although these manuscripts had relatively little influence outside a limited circle, they are an invaluable source for Rezeptionsgeschichte, capable of providing detailed information about how the expanding knowledge of the world was invented, received, and reinvented by a category of people who seem to have occupied a position somewhere between popular and learned culture. In passing from Eskimos to representations of the Plinian monstrous races, and from non-European peoples to the Dutch, Coenen's paraethnographic oeuvre provides a chapter in what can on...

Deformed Discourse: The Function of the Monster in Mediaeval Thought and Literature by David Williams

R E VIE W S e d it o r ’s n o t e : David Williams recently won the Raymond Klibansky Prize in English for Deformed Discourse. ESC offers its congratulations on this award. David Williams, Deformed Discourse: The Function of the Monster in Med­ iaeval Thought and Literature (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s Uni­ versity Press, 1996). xiv, 392. $55 cloth. Several books could emerge from this work: a descriptive catalogue of me­ dieval and renaissance illustrations in the McGill Libraries; an annotated taxonomy of the monstrous and its relationship to medieval popular culture; a concise survey of the Pseudo-Dionysian philosophical system. The illustrations are in themselves remarkable. Apart from the McGill Libraries, they derive from manuscripts located in the Staatsbibliothek in Munich, the Vatican, the Bodleian, the British Library, the Bibliothèque Nationale and elsewhere; many are sufficiently rare to merit the attention of the most knowledgeable medievalist. There are also reproductions from frescoes, statuary, and a host of early printed books. The range is aston­ ishing: who, for example, even among specialists well-versed in art history, is familiar with the woodcut from Alixandre le Grant (233)? In it a long­ haired, semi-naked young woman, very modern-looking except for the crown on her head, stares with alarm at the lecherous snout of her bed-companion, the horned divinity busily engaged in siring Alexander. Perhaps the greatest value of this book lies in the fact that, in selecting the preponderance of his illustrative material from McGill, Professor Williams draws attention to the existence of this vast, eclectic collection. Most informative are chapters three and four where the author discusses the taxonomy of the monstrous and shows its application to the human body and to the “body” of nature. Using Isidore of Seville’s twelve tests of monstrosity (hypertrophy of the body, atrophy of the body, excrescence of bodily parts, superfluity of bodily parts, deprivation of parts, mixture of human and animal parts, animal births by human women, mislocation of organs or parts in the body, disturbed growth (being born old), composite beings, hermaphrodites, and monstrous races), Williams demonstrates how “the monstrous was conceptually organized throughout the Middle Ages and even down to our own time” (107). Less successful than the others is the last chapter of this section on taxonomy, which emphasizes the anthropomorphic alphabet and prodigious numbers. E S C 24 (D e ce m b e r 1998) ESC 24, 1998 Appearing passim in the entire work but especially fluent in the initial chapter is the discussion of the Pseudo-Dionysian system. For those whose philosophical/theological education is incomplete, the author provides a clear statement of pivotal concepts and stresses their influence from the eighth through the fourteenth centuries. Pseudo-Dionysius’ understanding of real­ ity is very important to the book’s thesis: The present study attempts to explain the conceptual function of the mon­ ster in mediaeval culture as the symbolic expression of a philosophical tra­ dition most fully articulated in the negative theology of Pseudo-Dionysius, the Areopagite. (5) The author has taken on the daunting task of relating a philosophical, conceptual system to a physical, perceptual phenomenon. The resultant intellectual exercise inevitably creates difficulties in extending this book’s argument to other areas of medieval studies. Williams considers that the heroic qualities in figures such as Oedipus and Alexander were reflected for medieval English audiences in the native King Arthur. His exhaustive analysis of the three heroes Alexander, Oedipus, and Gawain (231-84) from their earliest antecedents demonstrate some of the variations of the Western models of the epic hero and the numerous genres that have arisen from it. The author’s treatment of “monstrous” medieval saints such as Christo­ pher, Wigelforte, and Denis — itself a thorough and painstaking examina­ tion— reveals how alien medieval hagiography is to present consciousness. Saints were supposed to be different. Christopher was intended to be larger than life. The plainly hermaphroditic Wigelforte would occasion no surprise in the Middle Ages: she was perceived symbolically as Everyman/Everywoman and by extension as a Christ-figure embracing universal humanity. Denis’ decapitated head that continues to praise the Trinity is a sign of the...

Heaven and Earth in the Middle Ages: the physical world before Columbus

Part 1 Christopher Columbus and his achievement. Part 2 The Earth as the protected centre of a finite universe and the Earth as the yolk in the cosmic egg: the spherical shape of the world the cosmos as an egg the structure of the universe from the four elements. Part 3 The shape of the Earth: Columbus and the spherical shape of the Earth the learned clerical tradition the astronomical handbooks of the High Middle Ages and the universities circumnavigating the Earth disc or sphere? the background to the concept of the disc-shaped Earth. Part 4 The fascination of the world Down Under - the fourth continent and the Antipodes: the three continents and the medieval maps of the world the fourth continent Terra Australis Incognita and the Antipodes. Part 5 To the ends of the Earth: the far-off East the hot South the bleak North excursus hope in the East the Indian kingdom of Prester John. Part 6 The journey to the centre of the Earth - Jerusalem as the hub of the world. Part 7 The fruits of original sin - monstrous races on the edges of the world known to man: the discoverers and the cannibals Alexander and the wonders of the East the Europeans and the monsters. Part 8 God's mysterious ways, or the hidden powers of nature - astro-meteorology in the Middle Ages: earth water air fire. Part 9 A new continent, a new Earth, a new world - from Columbus to Galileo: geography astronomy. Appendix: interpretation of a medieval world map based on the Mappa Mundi in Hereford Cathedral.

Before Othello: Elizabethan Representations of Sub-Saharan Africans

Othello's yarns are symptomatic of the travelers' tales that circulated in England during the second half of the sixteenth century and beyond-narratives that ranged from mythical accounts of monstrous races and imaginary places to fact-filled reports of actual strangers and their remarkable homelands. Circulating in various written forms and, to a lesser extent, in visual embodiments on stages, in public pageants, and occasionally in graphic arts (see Figure I), such representations fashioned in many English minds a host of exotic Others-the distant denizens of Asia, Africa, and the Americas.2

The Eye of the Beholder: Deformity and Disability in the Graeco-Roman World.

The famous works of Greek and Roman sculpture present an image of anatomical perfection which, as we know from other sources, was quite unrepresentative of the population as a whole. This is a detailed investigation of the plight of the disabled and deformed in ancient society - of the deaf, the blind, the lame; of hunchbacks, dwarfs and giants; and of those afflicted with more severe disabilities such as Siamese twins and Cyclopians. This work draws on a range of material from drama and poetry, works of history, medical tracts, vase painting and sculpture, mythology and ethnology. It considers the high incidence of disability among the ancients; the jobs and lifestyles available to the disabled, and the prejudice, fuelled by religion, that they encountered. It examines how physiognomic principles were used as a way of stereotyping the deformed, the abuse to which they were regularly subjected; the possible medical options and cures; the religious and scientific explanations for the occurrence of congenital deformity, and the widespread belief in the existence of monstrous races.

The Monstrous Races in Medieval Art and Thought. John Block Friedman

<i>The Monstrous Races in Medieval Art and Thought</i>. John Block Friedman

John Block Friedman, The monstrous races in medieval art and thought, Cambridge, Mass., and London, Harvard University Press, 1981, 8vo, pp. xiii, 268, illus., £14.00.

John Block Friedman, The monstrous races in medieval art and thought, Cambridge, Mass., and London, Harvard University Press, 1981, 8vo, pp. xiii, 268, illus., £14.00.

The Monstrous Races in Medieval Art and Thought

The Monstrous Races in Medieval Art and Thought

Research Items

Wild Men in Assam. In a contribution to the Journal and Proceedings of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, vol. 27, No. 2, Mr. J. H. Hutton reviews the traditions relating to wild men current in the Naga Hills. Roughly they may be classified under five heads. (1) Little people, pixies, generally unseen but often audible and occasionally caught. To some extent they have the attributes of earth spirits. All tribes have traditions of jungle men who have been caught and kept, eventually becoming the ancestors of existing clans. It is possible that the tradition may be a reference to a race of negritos, who apparently did at one time inhabit the area now inhabited by the Nagas. (2) Ogres, near to the familiar rakshasas of Hindustan. They carry off children and fatten them for food. The daughters of these spirits have been known to marry mortals and live on human flesh. The ogre is perhaps the characterisation of a conquering race by the conquered. It is possible that cannibalism was actually practised at one time in Assam. So late as 1879 the flesh of a British officer killed at Khonoma was undoubtedly tasted by some of the young warriors. (3) Tiger-men. There is a widespread belief in the Naga Hills in a village further east where the inhabitants are lycanthropists tiger-men according to the Nagas, lion-men according to the Kukis; and in tradition this village is nearly always associated with cannibals and Amazons. The belief in tiger-men may be due to a misunderstanding of the totem kin in tribal contacts. It may also be due to contact with pathological cases such as have been recorded in the Malay Peninsula, and for which there is more doubtful evidence in the Naga Hills. (4) Amazons live still further to the east of the cannibal and tiger-men villages. They have marvellous methods of reproducing their kind. The martial aspect of the legend is absent; but the story probably arises from the fact that villages without males do exist. (5) Monstrous races which appear to be due to exaggerated accounts of physical peculiarities such as the ears enlarged by plugs and the extreme platyrrhiny of the Garos.