Hybridity, Identity, and Monstrosity in Medieval Britain: On Difficult Middles (review)

Jeffrey Jerome Cohen has in many ways defined the field of study known, following his seminal publication of the same title, as “Monster Theory,” an incipient area currently gaining traction in medieval studies. His works, including Monster Theory: Reading Culture (1996) and Of Giants: Sex, Monsters, and the Middle Ages (1999), laid much of the groundwork for the examination of the ways in which reading monsters allows us to understand the cultures in which they were created and consumed. His approach, deeply indebted to notions of abjection and disgust derived from psychoanalytical theory, has of late focused more explicitly on the postcolonial approaches pioneered by Edward Said and Homi Bhabha, as foregrounded in The Postcolonial Middle Ages (2000), a collection edited by Cohen. Both this collection and Hybridity appear in the New Middle Ages series, edited by Bonnie Wheeler, which has offered some of the most interesting and innovative contributions to medieval studies in recent years.

In Hybridity, Cohen focuses on collective identity, and on the ways that it is both shaped and shattered by cultural perceptions of “otherness.” The neat distinctions sought by medievals were, he argues, generally fictitious, and in reality the medieval world (like our own) was largely composed of what he calls “difficult middles.” These middleground individuals and communities were hybrid in nature, much like many of the monsters that obsessed them. Cohen is quite clear that by “hybrid” he does not mean a beautifully synthetic whole formed by the merging of disparate parts, “not some third term that synthesizes two warring elements and renders them placid” (145). Rather, it is like the cynocephalus, described in the Wonders of the East as a man having the head of a dog, the tusks of a boar, and the mane of a horse: a disunity formed by the incomplete incorporation of its constituent parts—a monster. As he writes, “Hybridity is a fusion and a disjunction, a conjoining of differences that cannot simply harmonize” (2).

One of the insights emphasized throughout the text is that hybridity is not exclusive to marginal groups and beings. While the term is often used to describe the distant monsters of Africa and Asia, or “others within,” such as Jews, and, in Spain, Saracens, Cohen emphasizes its relevance for mainstream European Christian cultures. The hybrid, hyphenated names used to describe cultures point to their unresolved natures. As he writes, “Contemporary scholars faced with medieval hybridities typically rely upon hyphenated terms like ‘Anglo-Scandinavian’ and ‘Anglo-Norman’ ”—as well, one might add, as “Anglo- Saxon,” embedded in their initial term—“[y]et these composite names have no counterpart in medieval terminology” (79). The hybridity of these groups, glossed over by unifying terms, was nonetheless palpable.

In his first and most overtly theoretical chapter, “Acts of Separation: Shaping Communal Bodies,” Cohen articulates the method by which he will analyze his texts throughout the rest of the volume. Essentially, he follows the notion of “dependent differentiation,” as articulated by Gillian Overing and Clare Lees. That is, collective identity is formed through “acts of separation” through which groups wall themselves off from others. This process, he argues, allows even groups hostile to one another (such as the Anglo-Saxons and Normans) to coalesce into rough unities, real hybrids, not imagined monsters but actual people living in interstitial situations. As Cohen writes of circumcised Christians and baptized Jews, “Such figures were in their very bodies caught in a difficult middle” (29). This process, though, had terribly real results for those who were its foils, the groups against which societies chose to define themselves. Anti-Jewish violence in medieval England, Cohen argues, was as much about the Anglo-Normans trying to define themselves as it was about the Jews themselves. Here as elsewhere, Cohen’s focus on the High Middle Ages demonstrates how “composite in fact, homogeneous in theory, the English of the twelfth century similarly began to demarcate themselves from these monstrous peoples that limned the margins...