NAKED BEFORE GOD: UNCOVERING THE BODY IN ANGLO-SAXON ENGLAND

The Donestre and the Person of Both Sexes

162 The Donestre and the Person of Both Sexes Susan M. Kim …[In]more innocent times it was possible to create a grotesque by mingling human with animal or mechanical elements; but as we learn more about the languages of animals, and teach more and more complex languages to computers, the membranes dividing these realms from that of the human begin to dissolve, and with them go the potentiality for many forms of the grotesque. In short, the grotesque — with the help of technology — is becoming the victim of its own success: having existed for many centuries on the disorderly margins of Western culture and the aesthetic conventions that constitute that culture, it is now faced with a situation where the center cannot, or does not choose to, hold; where nothing is incompatible with anything else; and where the marginal is indistinguishable from the typical. Thus the grotesque, in endlessly diluting forms, is always and everywhere around us — and increasingly invisible. --Geoffrey Galt Harpham, On the Grotesque1 he “Wonders of the East” survives in two illustrated manuscripts with texts in Old English: BL, Cotton Tiberius B. v, and BL, Cotton Vitellius A. xv.2 Not only these two versions of the “Wonders of the East” but also the related texts of the 1 Geoffrey Galt Harpham, On the Grotesque: Strategies of Contradiction in Art and Literature (Princeton, 1982), pp. xx-xxi. 2 The text in the Vitellius version is in Old English; the text of the Tiberius is in Latin and Old English. The somewhat later manuscript, Oxford, Bodleian Library 614, contains a text in Latin only. The following provide surveys of these and other related manuscripts, and insight into the backgrounds and traditions which inform these texts and illustrations: Stanley Rypins, ed., Three Old English Prose Texts in MS Cotton Vitellius A. xv, EETS o.s. 161 (London, 1924); Rudolf Wittkower, “Marvels of the East: A Study in the History of Monsters,” Journal of the Warburg and Cortauld Institutes 5 (1942): 159-97; Paul Gibb, “‘Wonders of the East’: A Critical Edition and Commentary ” (unpub. Ph. D. diss., Duke Univ., 1977); John Block Friedman, The Monstrous Races in Medieval Art and Thought (1981: repr. Syracuse, 2000); Mary P. Campbell, The Witness and the Other World: Exotic European Travel T The Donestre 163 Liber Monstrorum contain descriptions of hybrid monsters called “Donestre.”3 In the verbal descriptions, the Donestre are partly human, and use their facility with human speech to lure their human victims to approach. Once the victims approach the Donestre, the monsters eat them. Mary B. Campbell reads the description of the Donestre as the “most active of all the descriptions of dubious human races in the Wonders” but adds that the activity is “infinitely repeating…like that of a peep show. It is the only action the Donestre perform, and it is not only unmotivated, but self-contradictory.”4 Although she focuses on the text, Campbell’s reading of the episode is also supported by the illustrations of the “Wonders of the East.” The most marked common features of the Vitellius and Tiberius illustrations of the Donestre are the exposed genitalia of the monster (unmentioned by the text) and the dismemberment of the human victim. In the Tiberius illustration (figure 17: Donestre), the genitalia are emphatically clear, not only clearly marked, but also red. In the Vitellius illustration (figure 18: Donestre), the genitalia are similarly exposed. The Vitellius illustration, moreover, pairs the monster with a female figure unmentioned by the text, thus providing a context of sexual difference to underscore the exposure of the clearly male monster. As John Block Friedman has argued, “the monstrous races in medieval art were often shown naked or wearing only animal skins” in part as a “necessary convention in that it enabled the artist to show their anatomical peculiarities,” but more importantly as “a sign of wildness and bestiality — of the animal nature thought to characterize those who lived beyond the limits of the Christian world.”5 The juxtaposition in both the Tiberius and the Vitellius illustrations of the naked Writing, 400-1600 (Ithaca, 1988); Andy Orchard, Pride and Prodigies: Studies in the Monsters of the Beowulf-Manuscript (Cambridge, 1995). 3 On the Liber Monstrorum, see the above invaluable sources, in particular, Orchard, Pride and Prodigies, pp. 86-115. 4 Campbell, Witness and the Other World, p. 73. 5 Friedman, Monstrous Races, pp. 31-32. Susan M. Kim 164...