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The Monstrous Middle Ages (review)

2005; Australian and New Zealand Association for Medieval and Early Modern Studies; Volume: 22; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/pgn.2006.0044

1832-8334

Mary Scrafton,

Folklore, Mythology, and Literature Studies

Reviewed by: The Monstrous Middle Ages Mary Scrafton Bildhauer, Bettina and Robert Mills, eds, The Monstrous Middle Ages, Cardiff, University of Wales Press, 2003; paper; pp. xiv, 236; 19 b/w illustrations; RRP £16.99; ISBN 0708318223. The papers from two English conferences that form this collection try to describe a culture in terms of what it marginalizes and excludes. Do monsters always imply sin, or may their deviance be a natural variation, a mystery that paradoxically demonstrates that they partake of the Divine? Deborah Youngs and Simon Harris show how Church and secular authorities used the symbolic baggage of Night to control nocturnal activities. Florence's 'Office of the Night' was founded specifically to combat sodomy. Religious should be awake, performing their longest Office, Matins, to combat night's spiritual perils. By the thirteenth century, the 'benign spirits known as "ladies of the night"' (p. 139) were becoming the subject of Church repression. This is the period in which Bettina Bildhauer sees German visual and written evidence of a connection between Jews, blood-loss and blood-shedding, and marginal groups. Beneath their caption on the literal edge of the now-destroyed Ebstorf map, 'Alexander has enclosed the two unclean people, Gog and Magog, who will accompany the Antichrist. They eat human flesh and drink blood' (p. 80). They were depicted like Jews, 'executioners, prostitutes and demons' (p. 80)". Contemporary preachers like the Franciscan Berthold of Regensburg called both Jews and murderers 'blood-drinkers' (p. 88). By 1235 the 'Blood Libel' (that Jews kidnapped Christian children to procure their blood) led to a pogrom in Fulda. Like Gog and Magog, Fenrir the giant wolf and the World Serpent will escape their bonds at the end of time to fight the Norse gods at Ragnarök. Óðinn the '"feeder of wolves"' (p. 159) will himself become food for Fenrir. Some tenth- and eleventh-century British church crosses appear to depict these events, combining Christian and pagan apocalypticism. At the same time, the image of the hellmouth, a living bestial maw, developed in England and spread across Europe. Aleks Pluskowski distinguishes demonic devourers (wolves, snakes and dragons) from the weaker cats, birds and foxes that attack and consume humans on the twelfth-century church door at Kilpeck and in Bosch's paintings. In Sarah Salih's reading of Mandeville's Travels, monstrous hybridity becomes a site for reflection on natural laws. Whereas his source Friar Odoric of Pordenone dismisses the inhabitants of Chana as animist idolators, Mandeville launches into a discussion of the distinction between worshipping simulacra (real or artefacts) and pagan idols. His 'idiosyncratic theory of representation' (p.120), equating [End Page 194] their life under natural law with a form of monotheism, was abridged or omitted in most copies, and his illustrators struggled to portray the distinction. Similarly, his cynocephali are not spiritually lacking (as in the St Christopher legend), but inhabit a feudal society in which even cannibalism is culturally explicable. Two writers take Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe as their examples of female mystics, which is perhaps problematic given their singularity. According to Liz McAvoy, they subvert the Aristotelian equation of feminine with deviant and imperfect, so as to give themselves permission to experience and record on their own terms. For them, what is monstrous is 'an overdetermined expression of the masculine' (p. 58, her italics), with Christ appearing feminized and passive. Robert Mills develops Michael Camille's claim that late medieval images of Christ were infected by the grotesquery surrounding them in marginalia. Without trying to establish direct borrowings, Mills considers three different genres: the visions of Julian and Margery; spiritual bestiaries like those of the Anglo-Norman Guillaume le Clerc; and individual encounters like the talking Christian werewolves who lead Gerald of Wales to reflect on Christ's hybrid nature and the mystery of transubstantiation. Finally Mills describes reactions to the three-headed Trinity and other bizarre literal depictions of theological doctrine. Gerald of Wales, child of a Welsh father and a half-Norman mother, clerical member of a Marcher family, was himself a hybrid creature whose Welshness disqualified him, in the eyes of Henry II, from the see of St David's, his one...