Saracens, Demons and Jews: Making Monsters in Medieval Art (review)

This handsomely produced and beautifully illustrated volume deals with the ways that medieval artists represented peoples outside the Christian oikumene, social outcasts and various "others" deemed to be enemies of the faith. The writer (under the name Debra Hassig) is the author of earlier studies on medieval bestiaries and the apocalyptic mark of the Beast, and the present work can be seen as an extension of certain strands of thought rooted in these publications. Her material is chiefly drawn from French and English literature and book illumination of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and the picture which it conveys is evidently allied to the militant tendencies in the age of the Crusades toward control and exclusion that Robert I. Moore has termed "the formation of a persecuting society," or indeed, a symptom of it. The book proposes that alterity or dissidence could be made visible and stigmatized for what they are through the attributes of monstrosity, a concept that has recently received additional attention (as in Bettina Bildhauer and Robert Mills, eds., The Monstrous Middle Ages [Toronto, 2003]). Physical ugliness in this reading is equated with sin, and monstrosity—ugliness in an extreme form—thus became "a metaphor for unacceptability, both cultural and religious" (p. 8).

The book consists of six chapters. The first is devoted to an exploration of classical theories which sought to account for the varieties of human appearance and character as most dramatically registered in the anthropoid creatures thought to be living beyond the boundaries of the known world, the dog-headed cynocephali, the headless blemmiae, the huge-footed sciopod, and more. This is followed by an exploration of medieval representations of demons, whose bestial aspect properly introduces the issue of deformity or hybridity as a sign of moral depravity. The third chapter is devoted to the depiction of Jews, a topic considered by the author to be "crucial to any study of pejorative imagery in the medieval West" (p. 9) and the main justification for the publication of the present review in this journal. Strickland then takes up representations of Muslims, followed by a discussion entitled "Eschatological Conspiracies" in which Jews again feature prominently as agents of the Antichrist and other mortal enemies of the true faith whose depredations at the end of time are announced in the Apocalypse. The concluding pages of the book address the question "What is a Monster" and, somewhat against the drift of the larger argument, discover in the term both positive and negative connotations.

Strickland draws for her evidence on two separate strains in the existing scholarship, both fairly acknowledged in the body of the text and notes. The first is the anthropological, more or less neutrally descriptive tradition of the Marvels of the East, founded on the writings of Pliny and Solinus and explored in studies of Rudolph Wittkower and John Block Friedman. The second consists of the evidently much more charged repertory of adversarial motifs and stereotypes of pariah groups assembled, with reference to the Jews in particular, by Bernhard Blumenkranz and Heinz Schreckenberg, and, on a more general plane, by Ruth Mellinkoff, to whose important work should perhaps be added the pertinent observations of Michel Pastoureau on color symbolism in medieval dress. Strickland's thesis merges these two streams, the first supplying a fabulous vision of eccentric anatomies, the second the polemical conversion of these mirabilia into instruments of exclusion and vilification.

Is this thesis tenable? There is no doubt some justification in treating all medieval "others"—prostitutes, lepers, as well as demons, heretics, Jews, Saracens, Tartars and eschatological troublemakers of various stripes who receive detailed or at least passing attention in Strickland's book and the studies on which it draws—as a single species to be endowed with similar marks of infamy. The generous anthology of images assembled by the author in any case makes it possible for the reader to...