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CHAPTER 8 MonstrousMovements andMetaphors in Dantes Divine Comedy VIRGINIA JEWISS What is that ridiculous monstrosity doing, an amazing kind of deformed beauty and yet a beautiful deformity? What are the filthy apes doing there? . . . The monstrous centaurs? The creatures, part man and part beast? Bernard of Clairvaux Scholars of medieval manuscripts, as if recalling Bernard of Clairvaux s questioning of the necessity of such disturbing monstrous representations,1 have paid particular attention to the figures in the margins of manuscripts.2 Their studies reveal that a startling array of monsters lurk in the margins of illuminated manuscripts, fill up the borders of the page, and surround and encroach on the text. The word "margin" means the edge, border, or frontier. In texts margins serve a visual purpose, and, as any medieval illuminator or scribe knew, an ideological one; the margin is the place ofthe gloss, commentary, and annotation as well as the disputatio, the space of disagreement, juxtaposition, and conflict. Margins, and the monsters in them, create a spatial and ideological problem as well as an aesthetic and contextual challenge to the texts they accompany, for the fantastic beasts often, and seemingly inappropriately, accompany books of prayer, theological works, and spiritual meditations. I propose to transfer the study of marginal monsters back to the text. If monsters appear with such frequency in the borders of medieval manuscripts, where do they surface in medieval literature? If they mark and engage the text visually, how do they do so verbally, thematically, structurally? If margins are charged spaces in the book qua book, what are they in the text? I shall quickly sketch the medieval concepts of the term "monster." The word is derived from the Latin "monere," to warn. Yet Augustine traces the etymology to "monstrare" as well, the Latin term meaning to show or display.3 Originally published in Forum Italicum 32 (Fall 1998): 332-46. 179 VIRGINIA JEWISS Exegetes of the Vulgate followed the Ciceronian understanding of the term as an omen, a sign ofthings to come, while common usage, derived from Aristotle's observations in the Generation ofAnimals, held that the monstrous was anything deviating from the natural order.4 This etymological instability is fitting, for monsters are never one pure essence; indeed, hybridization, a disturbing and perverse blurring of the categories of creation, is precisely what distinguishes the monstrous from the simply bestial. By their very nature monsters escape classification, frustrate the possibility of linguistic precision, embody an ontological ambivalence, and make visible the process of mutation. Language inverts itself to articulate the monstrous, as Bernard's instable "deformed beauty" and "beautiful deformity" demonstrate. Order, like grammar, is confounded by monstrosity. C. S. Lewis, commenting on why insects are so frightening, expressed what I would deem the disturbing characteristic of the monstrous: "their angular limbs, their jerky movements, their dry metallic noises, all suggest either machines that have come to life or life degenerating into mechanism."5 Lewis's insight focuses on the isolation of movement from one to another category: monsters terrify because they represent the potential for slippage on the Great Chain of Being as they move through the borders of established ontologies. It is not surprising, then, that some of the finest science fiction films exploit the liminality of the mechanical and the animate. Thinkers in the Middle Ages based their understanding of monsters on a wide array of sources. The Bible provided the foundations for the inquiries of theologians. From the giants in the Book of Genesis to the apocalyptic vision of monstrous beasts in the Book of Revelations, Scripture provoked meditation on the existence and humanity of the monstrous races. Apocryphal texts such as The Book of Enoch sparked further inquiry into the identity of beings neither man nor beast. Pliny's Historia naturalis and Solinus's Collectanea rerum memorabilium provided the classical framework for the idea of monstrous races. Medieval elaborations of the monstrous drew upon Isidore of Seville's influential Etymologiae and works such as the Liber monstrorum de diversis generibus, which catalogues monstrous humans, beasts, and serpents.6 All the great encyclopedias of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries include studies of marvels: Vincent of Beauvais's Speculum Naturale, Thomas of Cantimpre's De natura rerumy and Brunetto Latini's Tre'sor, to mention only a few, discuss the existence of monstrous races. Vastly popular bestiaries, inspired in part by the second century Greek Physiologus, teemed with descriptions of strange creaturely combinations. From the thirteenth century onward these creatures were more...

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