The Monstrous Middle Ages ed. by Bettina Bildhauer, Robert Mills (review)

REVIEWS 264 strates the rich rewards of thinking through the “moral seriousness” of that corpus anew. THOMAS JOSEPH O’DONNELL, English, UCLA The Monstrous Middle Ages, ed. Bettina Bildhauer and Robert Mills (Toronto and Buffalo: University of Toronto Press 2003) 236 pp. In the last decades, there has been a growing interest in the study of monsters in medieval art and literature. Besides having assessed the wide range of cultural uses to which monstrosity was put in the Middle Ages, scholars have come to realize not only how the Middle Ages have been often imagined as a time populated by monsters, but also how the period itself has sometimes been marginalized by mainstream historiography, especially when perceived as a “temporal monstrosity” that threatens “to disrupt modernity from its position on the edges of history.”25 Still, much work remains to be done on the sheer variety of functions that monstrosity possessed throughout the centuries, during and after the Middle Ages, in different environments and discursive contexts. Gaining momentum from the editors’ assertion that monsters “are not meaningless but meaning-laden,” The Monstrous Middle Ages advances the subject and provides a variety of case studies which disclose a series of cultural uses of monstrosity in medieval northern Europe and especially in Britain. The book contains ten essays for the most part originating at two conferences: a symposium on “Medieval Horror” held at Pembroke College, Cambridge (July 1999); and three linked sessions on “The Monstrous Middle Ages” at the International Medieval Congress of Leeds (July 2001). Focusing on a variety of literary, cartographic, and visual documents, the volume reinforces the view that monsters are polysemous entities, and that often it is not its own misshapen or hybrid body that makes the monster, but rather, its relation to other social or individual bodies. Monsters can therefore appear and function in a wide range of situations and to a variety of ends. While in some cases they may inhabit the margins of literary and cartographic texts, in other occasions they can demarcate boundaries in space, for instance distinguishing areas of the landscape in which demonic creatures do or do not appear, and in time, for example marking a distinction between night and day. As Bettina Bildhauer explains in her essay “Blood, Jews and Monsters in Medieval Culture,” monsters can also be defined as “borderline” entities, for example when they inhabit the margins of a literary work or when they are located at the fringes of a cartographic representation of the world. As shown by the Ebstorf mappa mundi and by a series of sermons of the Franciscan friar Berthold of Regensburg, the marginalization of monstrosity is not neutral in political terms. Rather, it can serve as index for the association between blood, Jews, and monsters, or it can make them all occupy the position of an “other” in the margins of the normative Christian body. Monstrosity also permeates, at least in a certain measure, some Medieval visual and literary representations of Christ. Elaborating on René Girard’s con25 As Bildhauer and Mills argue in the introduction to the present volume, the Middle Ages can “be said to operate itself as a kind of historiographic monster,” especially if conceived of as “an aberration between antiquity and modernity” (3). REVIEWS 265 ceptualization of the “monstrous double”—the process by which, in response to a community’s desire for differentiation from collectively experienced evils, the reciprocal violence of that community is displaced onto a sacrificial scapegoat —Robert Mills, in the essay “Jesus as a Monster,” reveals how a series monstrous features appear to be inscribed in the figure of Christ not only in a number of manuscript illuminations depicting the Christian deity as bestial or hybridized figure, but also in bestiaries and in mystic literature, remarkably in the works by Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe. The literary production of these two authors is also examined by Liz Herbert McAvoy in “Monstrous Masculinities in The Book of Margery Kempe and in Julian of Norwich’s A Revelation of Love.” Both texts, according to McAvoy, delineate the primary site of the monstrous as being not the incomplete and inadequate feminine, but an overdetermined expression of the masculine. Deliberately...