Week 11

What makes a
Monster
MST201 Getting Medieval: Myths & Monsters
 A2 Drafts & Exhibits
❖ Feedback
➢ Make sure to incorporate the feedback from your draft into your
final exhibit.
➢ This doesn’t mean you have to agree with it, just that you have to
engage with it.
➢ If anything in your feedback is unclear – ask!
❖ British Library website
➢ has been down since October due to a cyberattack, won’t be back
online until the New Year
➢ If you have already downloaded images etc. you can use them and
don’t need to provide a full citation, just give as much information
as you can.
➢ I have some images of the Beowulf manuscript on file.
 Reflection Weeks
❖ How did medieval people think about
monsters?

❖ What ideas from modern cultural and

literary theory can help us think about
medieval monsters?
 Studies and
Augustine (354-430 CE) conversion: Milan

The City of God

❖ One of the ‘Church Fathers’ – very influential
early Christian thinkers.
❖ His works were widely read and considered a
source of authority in the Middle Ages.
❖ Florilegia = collections of excerpts from important
authors.

6th C

Bishopric: Hippo
(modern Annaba)

Born: Tagaste
15th C (modern Souk
17th C
Ahras)
“Among these there are said to be certain ones who have one eye in the
middle of their forehead, among others the soles of the foot are turned
backwards toward the legs, among certain peoples of both sexes it is natural
that the right breast is male, the left female, and in intercourse with each
other both beget and bear children; among others there is no mouth and they
live only by breathing through their noses, others are a cubit in stature, whom
the Greeks call Pygmies from “cubit,” elsewhere women conceive at five years
and in life do not exceed eight years. Likewise they claim that there is a
people who have a single leg on their feet and cannot bend their knee, and
are wondrously swift. They are called “Skiopods,” because through the
summer, lying on their backs on the ground, they cover themselves with the
shadow from their feet. Certain men without necks have their eyes in the
shoulders, and other kinds of humans, or even quasihumans, which are
pictured in mosaic on the esplanade at Carthage, derive from books of even
more curious history.”
(City of God XVI.viii. trans. Gwendolyne Knight)
 Yale University
Library, Beinecke
BL Cotton MS Vitellius A.XV 102v https://hdl.loc.gov/loc.wdl/wdl.14416
MS 404 fol-113v
“Indeed, anyone born anywhere as a human, that is as a rational
mortal creature, however unusual their bodily form, or motion, or
sound, or their nature with any power, part, or quality, appears to our
notions, no one of faith may have a doubt that they derive their origin
from that single progenitor [Adam] .”

(City of God XVI.viii. trans. Gwendolyne Knight)

❖ Augustine asserts the humanity of these peoples in spite of their physical
differences.
❖ The main qualification for humanity is reason.
❖ This same definition is found in the Thousand and One Nights, in the
story of the fisherman and the demon:
➢ “I am a human being, whom God has endowed with reason and
thereby made superior to him.”
 Cynocephali

Werewolves? Panotii

Human–Reasoning
Grendel? Human Cyclops vs.
Unhuman–Unreasoning

Zahhak? Sciapods

Chest-face
“Among these there are said to be certain ones who have one eye in the
middle of their forehead, among others the soles of the foot are turned
backwards toward the legs, among certain peoples of both sexes it is natural
that the right breast is male, the left female, and in intercourse with each
other both beget and bear children; among others there is no mouth and they
live only by breathing through their noses, others are a cubit in stature, whom
the Greeks call Pygmies from “cubit,” elsewhere women conceive at five years
and in life do not exceed eight years. Likewise they claim that there is a people
who have a single leg on their feet and cannot bend their knee, and are
wondrously swift. They are called “Skiopods,” because through the summer,
lying on their backs on the ground, they cover themselves with the shadow
from their feet. Certain men without necks have their eyes in the shoulders,
and other kinds of humans, or even quasihumans, which are pictured in
mosaic on the esplanade at Carthage, derive from books of even more
curious history.”
(City of God XVI.viii. trans. Gwendolyne Knight)
“Monstra, “marvel,” reasonably gets its name from the action
of monstrare, “show” which indicates something by a sign”.
(City of God XXI.viii. trans. Gwendolyne Knight)
❖ “Like a letter on the page, the monster
signifies something other than itself: it
is always a displacement, always
inhabits the gap between the time of
upheaval that created it and the
moment into which it is received, to ​1. The Monster’s
be born again.” (p.4)
Body is a Cultural
❖ What cultural anxieties or concerns
might our monsters be channeling? Body
❖ What specific attributes of these
monsters can be connected to the
societies in which they were written?
❖ Monsters are killed off in one
tale, only to re-emerge in
another.
❖ “each reappearance and its
analysis is still bound in a
double act of construction and
reconstitution.” (pp.5-6)
2. The Monster
Always Escapes
❖ What types of monster reappear
in our tales?
❖ How do they change? What
remains the same?
❖ “they are disturbing hybrids whose
externally incoherent bodies resist
attempts to include them in any
systematic structuration. And so the
monster is dangerous, a form suspended
between forms that threatens to smash
distinctions.” (p.6) 3. The Monster is
❖ Why is this unreadability so
frightening?
the Harbinger of
❖ “the monster always escaped to return Category Crisis
to its habitations at the margins of the
world (a purely conceptual locus rather
than a geographic one).” (p.6)
The Map of the World (mappa mundi). Psalter
Map, England, c. 1265. British Library.
❖ “Any kind of alterity can be inscribed
across (constructed through) the
monstrous body, but for the most part
monstrous difference tends to be
cultural, political, racial, economic,
4. The Monster
sexual.” (p.7) Dwells at the
❖ Where might we see “the exaggeration Gates of
of cultural difference into monstrous
aberration” (p.7) in our texts?
Difference
❖ How do monsters reinforce, or
challenge, notions of difference?
5. The Monster Polices the
Borders of the Possible
❖ “The monster of prohibition exists to demarcate
the bonds that hold together that system of
relations we call culture, to call horrid attention
to the borders that cannot—must not— be
crossed.” (p.13)

❖ What boundaries do monsters police or

demarcate in these tales?

Nasr al-Soltani. ‘Eskandar Contemplates the Talking Tree.

c.1430. Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Ouseley Add. 176
f.311v.
❖ “The monster also attracts. The same
creatures who terrify and interdict can
evoke potent escapist fantasies; the
linking of monstrosity with the
forbidden makes the monster all the
more appealing as a temporary egress 6. Fear of the
from constraint.” (pp.16-17)
Monster is Really
❖ Why do we enjoy monster stories? Why
a Kind of Desire
did medieval people?
❖ How do dread and desire interact in
these stories?
❖ “These monsters ask us how we perceive
the world, and how we have
misrepresented what we have attempted
to place. They ask us to reevaluate our
cultural assumptions about race, gender, 7. The Monster
sexuality, our perception of difference,
our tolerance toward its expression. They Stands at the
ask us why we have created them.” (p.20)
Threshold… Of
❖ What can we learn from our monsters?
Becoming
About the societies in which their stories
come from? About ourselves through our
reaction to them?
What makes
a monster?