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Reviewed by:
  • The Monstrous Middle Ages
  • Jennifer Kolpacoff Deane
Bettina Bildhauer and Robert Mills, Eds. The Monstrous Middle Ages. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003. Pp. xiii + 236.

Medieval monsters are back, not just with a vengeance, but also with serious cultural work to do. Emerging out of a series of conference papers on medieval horror and monstrosity, this brief but engaging interdisciplinary volume reflects recent scholarly shifts by examining the range of constitutive cultural and symbolic uses to which monstrosity was put in the Middle Ages. Editors Bettina Bildhauer and Robert Mills have assembled an array of perspectives on productive monstrosities and their harnessing, including the contouring of bodies and landscapes, the symbolic shaping of holiness and identity, and the flexible but formative demarcation of both time and space. Rather than attempting encyclopedic coverage or classification, the essays instead offer the reader a representative sampling of “vantage points” from which to consider the medieval uses of monstrosity. As such, they succeed in conveying the ontological slipperiness of the category, as well as the uselessness of any attempt to define monstrous functions in singular or monolithic terms. Relatively diverse in topic, source material, and methodology, the essays are nevertheless linked by a strong introduction as well as by internal cross-references and occasional source overlap.

In the lucid introductory essay, Bildhauer and Mills locate the volume within the last two decades of scholarship, particularly emphasizing the shifting interpretive frameworks within which the medieval monstrous (and the historiographically “monstrous Middle Ages”) has been viewed. Emphasizing the transition of the monstrous in recent scholarship from negatively to positively defined—in other words, from something to be avoided to “something to be desired”—the editors orient the essays in relationship to the work of scholars including Caroline Walker Bynum, Jeremy Cohen, John Block Friedman, Timothy S. Jones, David Sprunger, and David Williams. They also identify the basic questions underlying the volume: What would the cultural history of the Middle Ages look like when viewed through its monsters? What sorts of cultural work did monstrosity perform? And what categories [End Page 202] did it upset, construct or enforce? The essay concludes with a theoretically inflected sketch of how twentieth-century psychological theories of the uncanny, uninhabitable, and abject have influenced scholarship of the monstrous, noting that while terms such as “freak” and “monster” possess the power to offend, their problematic nature is simultaneously the very source of their promise.

Four key themes emerge across the essays, the first of which is the polyvalence of monstrosity and its revelatory potential. Drawing on medieval maps, sermons, and a variety of other sources, for example, Bettina Bildhauer traces the potent links between “Blood, Jews and Monsters” to their roots in the thirteenth-century banishment of Jews to the dangerous, and increasingly crowded, margins of Christendom. This is no facile negative association of Judaism and blood violence, however, for Bildhauer shows how the categories of both Jews and blood—even the flowing blood of Christ—functioned in surprisingly similar conceptual terms. Neither entirely internal nor external to the body of Christendom, the liminal yet vital presence of both Jews and blood could serve as positive signs to Christians of God’s power. Bildhauer’s analysis thus reminds us that relationships among the monstrously marginalized merit closer scrutiny.

Second is the monstrous masculine, both positive and negative. In “Jesus as Monster,” Robert Mills explores the productive conjunction of sacred and monstrous across an array of textual and visual sources, ranging from the writings of female mystics to bestiaries, topographies, tricephalic sculptures, and iconographic manuscript illuminations. As indicated by the essay’s provocative title, Mills deftly reveals the coalescing of Christology and monstrosity via Jesus’s inherently hybrid status. Complex intersections of gender, monstrosity, and the sacred are further developed by Liz Herbert McAvoy, who examines Julian of Norwich’s and Margery Kempe’s strategic association of monstrosity and masculinity, and the implications of this inversion for feminine authority and holiness. Much has been written about monstrosity and the feminine, and these essays will hopefully stimulate further work on manly monsters, both divine and mundane.

The third theme, explored in many of the volume’s essays, is the mapping of...

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