Inconceivable Beasts: The Wonders of the East in the Beowulf Manuscript by Asa Simon Mittman and Susan M. Kim (review)

This book is full of wonders. Not only do Asa Mittman and Susan Kim present a diplomatic edition of the British Library, MS Cotton Vitellius Wonders of the East (famously included with Beowulf), they also provide two translations: a close one printed under their Old English transliteration and an idiomatic one. But the stunner is the color plates of all the folios of the Wonders, further replicated in black and white to accompany the second translation, along with color plates from the Cotton Tiberius Marvels, the Hereford, Cotton, and Psalter maps, and other illuminations. The Wonders of the Nowell Codex has never been the subject of a single monograph, much less one that includes the illuminations, and Inconceivable Beasts re-unites these signifying systems that work together. The authors defend these pictures, which have been compared unfavorably to the more sophisticated ones in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 614 and London, British Library, MS Cotton Tiberius B.v. They refute Kenneth Sisam’s perception of the Vitellius Wonders as “debased,” and reject E. V. Gordon’s and other editors’ emendations, offering an uncorrected transliteration that preserves line breaks and abbreviations.

In this important reunion of language and image, the authors situate the Wonders in a network of criticism that includes monster studies, art history, textual analysis, theories of representation, gender theory, ethnicity, codicology, frame theory, the semiotics of space, and material culture. Two basic emphases emerge: 1) the instability of representation and meaning carried within the concept and depiction of the “inconceivable beast,” and 2) the commingling of media, specifically the interplay of text and image with meticulous attention paid to the illuminations as they interact with the words. Their analysis of the perforated frames in Chapter 6 includes an excellent discussion of the parergon (Derrida, Kant), whereby scribe and illuminator make the monsters breach their frames and ensnare or point to the words on the folio. Likewise, the coauthors not only merge their different studies of teratology as art historian and literary scholar but interrogate the ways we assign significance. The book begins with the Bearded and Boar Tusked Women as a synecdoche for the Wonders: a “female” entity and “unworthy” (OE unweorðe ‘insignificant’) body that invites us to meddle with its text, much as Alexander destroyed the Boar-Tusked women pro sua obscenitate. Both the Vitellius and Tiberius manuscripts cast this phrase as of hyra micelnesse (for their greatness, or huge size), and former editors have erased this “mistake” by substituting unclennesse to match the Latin of Tiberius and Bodley. The authors happily restore the female monsters to their stature, warning us of the limiting processes by which we “come to know, to represent, to view and to read” (p. 22). They introduce us to the homodubii, the thrice-mentioned twimen who are dubious and doubly named. We learn of monstrous nakedness, monstrous genitalia with the possibility of a female Blemmye, the partial containment of monsters in their frames on the page and their context within the manuscript, their location in space and mind, and the damage done to their readability by fire.

No review can do justice to the book’s subtle arguments and innovative connections. Inconceivable Beasts speaks to us as seductively as the Donestre, inviting us into a multifaceted, poetic, and intellectual landscape one might defend as being consonant with its subject matter: a gigantic, hybrid body. Critiquing it might get one devoured. Many brilliant points are made, but there is also much digression and repetition to hold ideas together. Referencing and building upon so many important scholars in philosophy and art display the authors’ prodigious erudition and ingenuity, but their accumulation of more tangential exempla reopens the question of what limits can be set on significance. Everything said of...