Medieval Monsters: A Series | MOLLY PHILLIPS, Medievalist Meanders
To the medieval mind, the threat of the supernatural was one that was very real.
The monstrous sprung from an awareness of this threat.
It then spread across genres and functions from the fictitious to the political (and often both!)
The monstrous was my first love within the medieval world. This love has developed over the years, and I'm starting off Medievalist Meanders with a series to explore the topic.
A Series Introduction
St George and the Dragon, Verona MS 1853, 26r
Photo Credit: Wikimedia Commons
I believe that the reason that 'the monstrous' has so long captured the human imagination is its ability to transcend the realms of what we know. In this series, I'll explore the various ways in which this is true, through dedicating a post to a different type of monster.
Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, whose work was fundamental in the research that I did towards my undergraduate dissertation, calls a monster the 'harbinger of the category crisis'.
To be 'monstrous', therefore, is often not to be evil, malicious, violent, or demonic but instead to simply be other.
'The monster's body quite literally incorporates fear, desire, anxiety and fantasy... giving them a life and an uncanny independence.'*
In a world such as ours, which is fascinated by the notion of binary, the monster yet again finds itself with a new series of functions, oftentimes problematic, nearly always political in some way.
It was no different in the fourteenth century.
Monsters and the monstrous can be found everywhere, from the walls of churches, to the margins of manuscripts, written into the lives of saints and the conquests of heroes. They are a rite of passage, a category crisis, an 'other', a reflection of the self. They are an assertion of power, of goodness, purity, a contrast and a series of similarities.
In and of themselves, then, they not only draw attention to the category crisis, but are one.
And that's what makes them so cool...
Monsters are even carved into the very architecture of Church buildings
Photo Credit: Wikimedia Commons, Paris Monmatre, Sacré Cœur Gargoyle.
The Church
It is no secret that the Church was central to medieval law and order.
As an institution, the Church defined day-to-day life, regulating how individuals should approach their lives, preceding over the rites of birth and death, marriage and baptism: the events which book-end a life.
And the Church has a fascinating relationship with the monstrous.
The Bible itself has monsters aplenty. They are scattered throughout, especially within the Book of Revelation. Of course, this shows immediately the association between apocalypse and monsters, implying that one race cannot survive while the other is also thriving.
What is more, the locusts that swarm in The Book of Revelation are not ordinary creepy crawlies, but hybrid creatures with human faces and hair, lions' teeth and wings that sound like cavalry. This is Cohen's category crisis at play, a monstrous species as the harbinger of apocalypse, stretching across categories and definitions until it is strange, unnameable and often uncanny.
On a more recognisably monstrous basis, there's also a dragon in the Book of Revelation. The beast has seven heads and seven crowns, meaning it is a monstrous creature, but also carries the human semiotic value of kingship, crowned and therefore powerful.
The dragon drags the stars of Heaven and throws them to Earth, serving a very specific function that I will come back to.
As an institution that promised redemption, and defined the path you had to take to achieve it, it is significant that the Church should share such tales of monstrosity.
Monsters are literally carved into the architecture of Church buildings, as they are often punctuated with gargoyles and grotesques, adding to the drama of the structures that were supposed to manifest God's power on Earth. Grotesques are often also deeply uncanny, breaking the boundary between monster and human by offering traits of both.
From all this, we begin to see the connection of man with God, a connection peppered with the supernatural and the weird, oftentimes as a way of asserting, or reminding people of the Church's societal dominance.
Cyclops, the Blemmye and the Sciopods. Sounds like a fabulous band name.
Photo Credit: Cosmographia, Book V - Wikimedia Commons
Illuminations
Although they are ridiculously meme-able, it's important to remember that the little monsters and illuminations in the marginalia of medieval manuscripts often carry important symbolic value.
Many are associated with the concept of the alien, discovery and often conquering.
Blemmyes, for example - as pictured above. He's the fellow with the face on his chest - were thought to live in Africa, and then India, at a later date.**
Etymologically, 'blemmye' can be broken down from the Hebrew to mean 'without brain'. In many instances, the word has also come to mean blind. They first appeared in the writings of Herodotus, but they later appear in the Mappa Mundi [c1300], populating Ethiopia and in the travels of Sir John Mandeville [c1357], living between India and Myanmar.
The persistent location of Blemmyes or the 'headless folk' away from mainland Europe, along with the associations of the name and headlessness of them means that many a theory has been made towards their semiotic nature as a racial othering device in literature and art.
This is a fascinating and important topic, which I will cover properly at a later date in order that it might be explored in full, but once again we see the monster and the human category crisis alongside one another, with writers and artists trying to make some semblance of sense of what they do not know.
We also see the assertion of supposed superiority of one nation over another; like the monsters of the church, definitions of the monstrous is often a case of power play.
My own photo (complete with my own thumb... brilliant!)
Manuscript of The Ship of Fooles MS. in the Library at Norwich Cathedral.
Romance Tales
In the text of manuscripts - the stories themselves - monsters are configured carefully.
To behead a giant within the romance genre was a way for a boy to become a man. Fighting one's way through a forest full of beasts, and succeeding on one's quest was the triumph of good over evil.
It is here that we return to dragons, the monster that is perhaps most synonymous with the medieval landscape.
Our most famous medieval romance hero, King Arthur, bears the surname 'Pendragon'- pen dreic in Middle Welsh - translating etymologically to 'leader and warrior' which explains much about the power dragons exude, even just in the mention of them. What is more, it is a common cliche of the chivalric genre that dragons endangered villages, and maidens and that these were saved by brave, masculine knights.
Here, then, we see another category crisis and power assertion: the supposed binary of gender, and the physical superiority of one gender over another. This is to be a large part of any discussion of monstrosity on this blog - it was, indeed, the topic of my dissertation - but for now suffice it to say that the dragons and the giants of romance hold greater symbolic significance than being merely a big lizard or a huge man. Their monstrous bodies, and the ways in which these bodies interact with the human help people to define themselves and others, and shape important world views.
-_fol._110r,_St._Margaret_-_2009.276.110.a_-_Cleveland_Museum_of_Art_(cropped).jpg)
St Margaret, Guillaume le Rouge, 1510.
Photo Credit: Wikimedia Commons
Hagiography
The semiotics of dragonhood can be found in all their fire-breathing glory in the lives (and deaths) of the saints.
Then, as now, dragons were a winged serpent, often with red or green scales.
These guys pop up all over medieval bestiaries, in illuminations, in fantasy and romance and have many categories, identities and meanings. Their green and red skin is a sign of their symbolism: dragons are satanic. Oftentimes they are the bringers of bad news. There's a reason one pulls the stars from Heaven in the Book of Revelation, (and a reason that the guarder of Hobbit treasure is Smaug and that Donkey is initially scared of his future wife in Shrek... I mean what?)
Indeed, there's many reasons that these things are true, because, as with many monsters, dragons are not a single entity and do not have one single meaning.
They announce the apocalypse, they are the ultimate villain and to kill a dragon is to end the story. St George's encounter with one defines him, and thereby defines Englishness and creates a sense of patriotism and national pride. St Margaret is swallowed by a dragon in her prison cell, but is birthed from its stomach by virtue of her crucifix which the satanic beast cannot digest.
This is another meaning behind the slaying of a dragon:
'The saint is able to defeat of contain the dragon by the power of his faith, and his success in dealing with it is itself a demonstration of that faith'.***
The dragon is a crisis of pagan and Christian ways of life. The Saint often undergoes terrible torture and distress at the hands of the pagans, and faces the dragon by way of asserting their righteousness. Once done, too, the pagans must recognise the power and piety of the Saint, and often face conversion to the 'good' religion.
The category crisis again spreads across suggested binaries: good and evil, strength and weakness, man and woman, right and wrong. It also highlights the cracks between types of religion, and so we return again to the power and might of the Church, a righteous, pious Christian martyr, asserting their power through the destruction of the supernatural.
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