MEARCSTAPA

Kalamazoo Program, 2012

2012-01-23T17:03:00.001-08:00

Hello all!

MEARCSTAPA is sponsoring two exciting sessions at this year's Congress at Kalamazoo. I have pasted their information below. I have heard several of these speakers in the past, and so I can recommend them highly. I look forward to seeing you there! We will hold a business (read: "pub") meeting, with information to be determined closer to the Congress. The full program is online here.

Best,

Asa

Session 45

Bernhard 204

You’re So Juvenile: Monstrous Children in Medieval Culture

Sponsor: Monsters: The Experimental Association for the Research of Cryptozoology through Scholarly Theory and Practical Application (MEARCSTAPA)

Organizer: Asa Simon Mittman, California State Univ.–Chico; Melissa Ridley Elmes, Carlbrook School

Presider: Ana Grinberg, Univ. of California–San Diego

Is It a Boy, a Girl, or an Other? Monstrous Births of Non-monstrous Origins

Lisa Leblanc, Anna Maria College

Born For Monstrous Sanctity: Margaret and Her (Uncontainable) Dragon

Beth Sutherland, Univ. of Virginia

Twins and Hermaphrodites in Albertus and Pseudo-Albertus

Sarah Alison Miller, Duquesne Univ.

******************

Session 138

Schneider 136

Eyes of the Beholders: A Roundtable Discussion on the Monstrous

Sponsor: Monsters: The Experimental Association for the Research of Cryptozoology through Scholarly Theory and Practical Application (MEARCSTAPA)

Organizer: Asa Simon Mittman, California State Univ.–Chico; Renee M. Ward, Wilfrid Laurier Univ.

Presider: Larissa Tracy, Longwood Univ.

Us and Them: Cultural Relativism in the Middle French Secrets de l’histoire naturelle

John Block Friedman, Univ. of Illinois–Urbana-Champaign

Monsters in Dante’s Hell: Cultural Implications and Unorthodox Religion

Eric Morningstar, Univ. of Michigan–Flint

Monsters, A Definition

Marcus Hensel, Univ. of Oregon

Dogs, Devils, and the Rhetoric of Total Audibility

Jeannie Miller, New York Univ.

Submissions for KZoo 2012 Session I: Monstrous Children

2011-08-15T11:24:00.000-07:00

1. Jenna Stook, Mount Royal University and the University of Calgary
Monstrous Unions and Hideous Progeny: A Consideration of the Lump Child in the Auchinleck King of Tars

The Middle English romance The King of Tars features both the motif of the monstrous birth and that of miraculous conversion. In the romance, the unnamed Christian princess marries the Saracen Sultan of Damascus, and later gives birth to a child. The women attending the birth are described as being “wel sori” for the child is decidedly monstrous: it is a formless lump of flesh without human physiology and without “liif.” This paper will begin by unpacking the description of the child as “lifeless.” The nature of the child's monstrosity, I will argue, lies in its lack of an animating force (a presumably Christian soul) and its indeterminacy. The child, a product of an interfaith and interracial marriage, is a hybrid figure who occupies a middle space between human and non-human, Christian and Saracen. The paper will then consider the cause of the child's monstrosity in light of medieval Christian injunctions against intermarriage and interfaith sex. The King of Tars presents the interfaith union and the child it produces as equally monstrous because both expose classificatory boundaries as fragile and both threaten to dissolve the border between self and other. The threat posed by the lump child to boundary order is ultimately contained through his miraculous conversion: the child transforms from a monster into a well-formed boy full of life.
___________________________________________________________________________

2. Sarah Alison Miller, Duquesne University
“Twins and Hermaphrodites in Albertus and Pseudo-Albertus”

This paper explores how medieval philosophical and medical texts represent the relationship between the procreation of multiple births, conjoined twins, and hermaphrodites. Although conjoined twins and hermaphrodites fell squarely in the category of monstrosity, late-medieval theories of human generation acknowledged twins to be a species of monster produced by a number of possible factors: an unnatural conception, an imperfect womb, a lack or excess of matter, a failed process of material division, or the influence of a constellation. Albertus Magnus’ De animalibus and Pseudo-Albertus Magnus’ De secretis mulierum grapple with the disparate embryological models inherited from ancient medicine, Arabic gynecology, and medieval astrology in an effort to come to terms with the slippage between normative and monstrous offspring. Ultimately, though tacitly, these texts reveal the troubling combinations and divisions entailed by the creation of a human being. By considering how pleasure, sexual shenanigans, female anatomy, and the cosmos itself impinge upon this process, this paper probes the teratogenic conditions at the origins of all human life.

___________________________________________________________________________

3. Lisa LeBlanc, Anna Maria College

Monstrous Births of Non-monstrous Origin

The origins of monsters have long interested scholars . From Grendel’s lineage to the birth of Echidna’s monstrous offspring, fantasy and folklore has attempted to account for the monsters created by human imagination. Not all monstrous children are born to monsters, however. In the Middle Ages, folklore attributed monstrous births to several causes. In some cases, they were attributed to demonic causes, such as Merlin, or to the unrevealed supernatural nature of the mother, such as the legend of Melusine. In other cases, monstrous births were attributed to natural causes, such as intercourse during a woman’s menstrual period, which was believed to cause leprous births, or adultery which led to multiple births, seen as monstrous in ancient and medieval times. Later superstitions moved the cause of monstrosity outside the woman, such as viewing a traumatic event.

How does the knowledge that these “monsters” are of human origin affect how society views them? While in ancient times, the father had the right to accept or reject the child at birth, the Middle Ages did not look as kindly on the abandonment of infants. So what happened to such infants? Furthermore, since these monstrosities were often seen as the result of the sin of the parents, particularly the mother, did the changing view of the causes of monstrosity help to alleviate the “othering” of the parent as either not human or as a significant enough sinner to be punished in this way? This paper will explore the superstitions concerning monstrous births in the human community through records of the superstitions and through their treatment in literary texts to analyze the reaction of the community to the monstrous birth, to see how these ideas changes over time, and to analyze how the authors of such legends use, or even overthrow, these superstitions.

___________________________________________________________________________

4.Jenny Howe, Tufts University
“sum fendys son”: Demonic Births and Monstrous Mothers in Sir Gowther

The folklore motif of the “Wish Child” appears in many medieval romances and legends. Such stories, in which parents desperate to conceive pray to God and are granted a child, are most often associated with accounts of the life of St. Anne and the Annunciation. But God is not always the benefactor of these prayers; instead, a devil or demon sometimes visits the mother, usually in the guise of her husband, and begets upon her a child wild and fiendish. The late fifteenth-century romance, Sir Gowther, provides a potent example of this type of Wish-Child motif, for Gowther, the product of such a coupling, is so aggressive and violent that he suckles nine wet nurses to death.

This paper will consider how the Wish-Child motif generally and Sir Gowther in particular manifest medieval anxieties surrounding maternity through the depiction of monstrous offspring. I will argue that, in light of medieval theories of the body that read the maternal corpus as a source of contamination and corruption to the child, the Wish-Child story reproduces precarious images of motherhood through the creation of children that are both mortal and divine, natural and unnatural. Turning specifically to Gowther’s unnatural corporeality and the violent acts that posit him as “sum fendys son,” I will show how Sir Gowther ultimately repudiates the maternal body and asks us to consider how monstrous births “monsterize” the women that engender them.

___________________________________________________________________________

5. Maria Fields, Henderson State University
“Þerefore is lorn þis litel faunt”: Colliding Xenophobia and Late-Medieval Piety in the Auchinleck King of Tars

In the Auchinleck (National Library of Scotland Advocates’ Manuscript 19.2.1) King of Tars, the poet likens the child of the Christian princess and her Saracen husband to a monster, describing it as “a rond of flesche… wiþouten blod & bon” and having “noiþer nose no eye” (580-82, 584). The monstrous child functions as a symbol of the intersection of xenophobia and late-medieval piety and serves to further differentiate his mother from the Virgin Mary because he exists in opposition to the perfection of the Christ Child. Utilizing a deconstructionist approach, I examine the poem’s opposing symbols, their collision in the formless child, and the resulting societal implications.

___________________________________________________________________________

6. Julie Nelson Couch, Texas Tech University

Apocryphal Childhood in the London Thornton Manuscript

In this paper I will consider the function of the Infancy poem and its title, ³The Romance of the childhode of Ihesu Criste that clerkes callys Ypokrephum,² in the context of the London Thornton manuscript. While the story of Jesus¹ childhood is already present in the Cursor Mundi extract Thornton includes as a prequel to the Northern Passion, Thornton returns to the subject of child Jesus, this time presenting him explicitly in an apocryphal time within a romance narrative. In comparing this version to

four other instances of the Middle English Infancy, it is apparent that this poem¹s differences link it to texts in the Thornton manuscript; these differences include: amplifying the role of Mary as one who parents child Jesus, tying child Jesus' outlandish acts to his later Passion, and utilizing more explicitly the narrative structures of romance. This poem seems to introduce, with its emphasis on ³solaunce² and its sheer relish of play, a reading experience different from somber affective meditation, one that is entertaining and didactic, perhaps suggesting a young reader. Strong didactic and typological threads appear to tamp down the wildness of the child Jesus; nevertheless, the wild abandon of the Christ child and even of Mary, who by the end enjoys with great laughter Jesus¹ pranks as much as he does, creates a narrative momentum that allows for a reading that is more fluid than a didactic agenda would suggest. Childhood itself becomes a rhetorical, albeit contained, space that allows for non-orthodox, playful

reading.

___________________________________________________________________________

7. Beth Sutherland, University of Virginia
Born for Monstrous Sanctity: Margaret and Her (Uncontainable) Dragon

This paper examines monstrosity’s role in three Saint Margaret vitae: the Legenda aurea, South English Legendary, and Katherine Group redactions. Margaret enjoyed immense popularity as the patron of childbirth due to her consumption by a dragon and eruption out of its belly. Her hagiographers, however, express discomfort with this plot-point. Laden with miracles, angels, and demons, taking saints’ lives literally would have required herculean feats of credulity. This specter of dubiety reaches its crisis point when the dragon slithers onstage. The dragon epitomizes all the vita’s semantic slippage, becoming a site at which the hagiographer can puncture the genre by expressing doubt. Deployment of the monstrous constitutes a violent but also a liberating move: eruption, but also birth. Two hagiographers conjure this monstrous spectacle only to disclaim it, exorcising readers’ concerns about their ‘good faith.’ That they protest on theological grounds is perplexing: one could easily redeem the episode as a Jonah analogy. Jesus claims that wonder-seekers will receive only the ‘sign of Jonah,’ taken as an allusion to the Harrowing of Hell. The third hagiographer has Margaret mention the Harrowing before being swallowed, and after asking God for a ‘sign’ of her enemy. He describes the dragon with delectation, recognizing it as a handy phenomenological tool, not a stumbling-block. Theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar describes hell’s inability to contain divinity. Sheol takes Jesus in but must immediately eject him. Hell’s spewing is akin to birth pangs, making Jesus a monstrous birth—issuing forth from what gets represented iconographically as the jaws of a beast. Erupting out of the dragon’s belly, the saint acts as a typological post-figuration of Christ while foreshadowing her rebirth through martyrdom . Monstrosity plays an almost biologically essential role in God’s soteriological project, acting as a womb for sanctity.

___________________________________________________________________________
8. Stephanie Norris, University of Iowa
“This Can’t Be the Terrible Two’s: Nursing at the Breast of Violence in Sir Gowther”

The late fourteenth century English tale Sir Gowther, a derivative of the French Robert the Devil, narrates the quest for redemption of a knight whose lust for rapacious violence during his youth bears witness to his demon parentage. At the age of fifteen, Gowther’s gigantic stature and unbelievable physical strength facilitate the acts of excessive violence he commits against the people of Austria, particularly clergyman, female religious and married couples. However as an infant, before he was old enough to hang parsons on hooks or burn hermits alive, Gowther’s fiendish ancestry is made manifest in a seemingly insatiable appetite. In fact, the infant Gowther suckles nine wet-nurses to death prior to tearing his own mother’s nipple from her breast when she attempts to nurse him in their stead. Although shockingly heinous, Ian Mitchell-Smith suggests that such acts of excessive violence are sanctioned by the text and reaffirm the homo-social bond of the court, given that they are enacted within the appropriate context (outside the space of the court) and against the proper target (Saracens and other non-Christians). Advancing this perspective, I argue that the violence displayed by Gowther during his childhood actually betrays a cultural anxiety about the miscegenation of Christians with Jews and Saracens – and the threat to stable identity binaries such mixing poses - not just the legitimization of Gowther’s nobility through properly directed violent acts. Reading specific instances of violence in Gowther’s youth in light of his fiendish birth and the bizarre circumstances surrounding his conception in conjunction with the volatile socio-religious culture of late medieval England, I contend that Gowther’s adolescent rabblerousing performs an apprehension about the amalgamation of disparate racial and religious identities that the text struggles to quell.
___________________________________________________________________________

9. Anna Dow, University of Alberta

In twelfth- and thirteenth-century epic literature the child occupies a liminal status as an empty figure of futurity, divided between death and the potential for heroism. In the Völsunga Saga Sigmund tests King Siggeir’s children for courage, and when they are found wanting he kills them; as neither child is destined to be the hero of the tale it is deemed unnecessary that either should exist. It is Sinfjotli who eventually passes the test, and is therefore permitted to progress into adulthood in order to fulfil his heroic destiny. In a second case, Cú Chulainn’s heroism in the Táin bó Cúailnge is supplemented by the recitation of his childhood deeds. In this instance the child is central to Cú Chulainn’s development, and yet exists only in futurity as a retrospective version of the hero himself. There are two primary points to be addressed here: first, the child’s status as a non-existent and hence monstrous ‘other’ in the literary examples provided; and secondly, the temporal status of the medieval child as a symbol for narrative and heroic potential. Each question also highlights a particular issue for contemporary medieval studies, which is the necessity to differentiate between original and contemporary perceptions of the literature at hand. Interestingly enough, recent work has emerged on the futurity of the child in contemporary society (see Kathryn Bond Stockton’s The Queer Child), and it seems that the dismissal of the child as a symbol of futurity might have deeper roots in our literary history than previously thought.

Submissions for KZoo 2012 Session II: Eye of the Beholder

2011-08-15T11:23:00.000-07:00

Marcus Hensel, University of Oregon
Monsters, a Definition

The last twenty or so years have brought with them a heart-warming rise in scholarly work on medieval monsters, but the precision of language used in our analysis has not kept pace. Monster, as a term, has been stretched far past its denotative limit because the prevailing wisdom holds that categorizing the monstrous imposes, to use David Williams’ words, “fundamentally arbitrary and absolutely impermanent” structures. In this paper, I will respond to each of these issues as I construct a working definition of the monster.

First, I reject the notion that categorizing the monstrous is necessarily arbitrary. By using a Cartesian (coordinate) plane, I propose two axes—morphology and behavior—by which to judge potentially monstrous characters: each axis runs from normal/normative to abnormal/antisocial. These axes, in turn, create quadrants, and the one (-x, -y) created by a combination of antisocial behavior and abnormal morphology is the realm of the “monstrous.”

The second issue, the impermanence of definitions, I embrace. Because “antisocial” and “abnormal” are dynamic labels, I follow Noel Caroll in using a situational application. Are the characters in question welcomed or shunned by dominant social structures depicted in the text? Do they provoke disgust? Fear? Violent responses? Does the author treat them more sensitively than the characters? Looking primarily at textual clues with regard to morphology and behavior avoids transcendent (and therefore reductionist) views that ignore local knowledge. But it still provides a framework for differentiating between Grendel and Grettir, or Merlin and a manticore.

_______________________________________

Eric Morningstar, University of Michigan-Flint
Monsters in Dante's Hell: Cultural Implications and Unorthodox Religion

Writing towards the end of the Medieval Ages, Dante Alighieri’s treatment of monstrosity in the Inferno has many important implications for the text itself and for its author. In the Inferno, Dante includes a variety of monsters, including Charon, Minos, Medusa, Pluto, centaurs, and more. Some monstrous figures like Charon and Minos even function to keep Hell running. The inclusion of monstrous figures in Hell serves to make it a truly terrifying place of punishment for sinners, an important goal for Dante as a writer as he criticized many of the corrupt Florentines responsible for Dante’s own exile. Aside from this artistic and political motive, however, Dante’s inclusion of monsters in Hell has some predictable and other disturbing implications. One may read Dante’s placement of monstrous creatures outside of Christianity as servants in Hell as a way of affirming Christianity’s truth over what Virgil describes as, “…the season of the false and lying gods.” This interpretation is predictable given Dante’s dedication to Catholicism. However, one may also pay attention to the role of functionality in his Hell and raise questions. Much like the gates of Hell, the description of which reads, “…MY MAKER WAS DIVINE AUTHORITY, THE HIGHEST WISDOM, AND PRIMAL LOVE...,” one may also view the monstrous servants, representative of false gods, as functional creations of the Christian god. From this second view, the current paper will explore the cultural implications of Dante’s treatment of God as a creator of false gods and architect of damnation for pre-Christians.

_______________________________________

Jeannie Miller, NYU

Dogs, Devils, and the Rhetoric of Total Audibility.

The voluminous encyclopedic works of al-Jahiz (d. 868 AD), “father of Arabic prose,” exhibit a compulsive return to the monstrous, to intercategory beings, and to exceptions broadly speaking. Eunuchs, cross-breeds, exceptional sexual practices, deformities, speech impediments – the list feels infinite. This impression of infinity derives from al-Jahiz’s rhetoric of total audibility, through which he performs an unlimited availability of knowledge. Indeed, one could read the omnipresence of exception in al-Jahiz’s work as the byproduct of a quest to include within the boundaries of knowledge that which was formerly distinguished by its very unknowability. And yet the same rhetoric of total audibility that drives al-Jahiz to noisily include monsters at every turn also prevents him from silencing the many cultural voices broadcasting that unknowability.

As al-Jahiz re-theorizes monstrosity within total audibility, what changes and what remains the same of monstrosity’s formal function and cultural significance? My paper moves toward answering this question using the example of the dog in al-Jahiz’s Book of Animals. The dog’s impurity was Islam’s shibboleth, and the sociopolitically tinged perspectives on the dog cited in the Book of Animals testify to the epistemological and political effects of the dog’s recategorization as dirty within the various communities of the new Islamic empire. The total audibility of cultural discourses in this polyphonic text provides a kaleidescopic image of the dog’s exceptionalism. In the end, al-Jahiz’s “accessible monstrosity,” with its unique sociopolitical valence, boils down to the same core disturbance as the “secret monstrosity” of the other voices cited in the text: the dog is more human than is proper for an animal.

Kalamazoo CFPs 2012

2011-08-10T09:46:00.000-07:00

With apologies for cross-posting:

CALL FOR PAPERS

MEARCSTAPA Session for the International Medieval Congress at Western Michigan University

Kalamazoo, Michigan

May 10-13, 2012

Session I: “You’re So Juvenile: Monstrous Children in Medieval Culture”

In the medieval tradition, monsters serve as warnings, omens, portents, signs of the threshold between Us and Them, Here and There. Patrolling the borders of what is known and unknown, they signify all that humankind most fears and all that is possible beyond human understanding, good, bad and ugly in nature. As such, monsters inevitably are portrayed as decidedly non-human figures. But what about monstrous children? The presence of children problematizes the traditional Us-Other binary presented by most medieval monsters by normalizing them: children/offspring signify families; families signify communities, and this brings monsters into the realm of humanlike existence. How should we read, see, and interpret such figures, given the traditional view of the monstrous as inhuman? Do monstrous children underscore the difference of monsters, or do they provide a new, more encompassing view of monsters as more like humans than we want to believe? Are the offspring of monsters, themselves, automatically monstrous? What in the case of monstrous offspring raised by humans, or of human offspring raised by monsters? If a monster is baptized, is it then rendered human? Perhaps the standard taxonomy needs to be re-examined in light of the presence of monstrous children.

Abstracts of no more than 250 words should be sent to Asa Simon Mittman (asmittman@csuchico.edu)

Deadline for submissions to this session: September 15.

Any papers not included in this session will be forwarded to the Congress Committee for possible inclusion in the General Sessions.

Note, paper proposals will appear on the Mearcstapa blog: http://medievalmonsters.blogspot.com/

CALL FOR PAPERS

MEARCSTAPA Session for the International Medieval Congress at Western Michigan University

Kalamazoo, Michigan

May 10-13, 2012

Session II : “Eye of the Beholder: Perspectives on the Monstrous”

Monstrosity, like beauty, lies entirely in the eye of the beholder. It is a trait assigned from the outside, which reveals as much about the namer as the named. For this session, we invite papers that explicitly tackle the issue of perspective in designation of the monstrous. Central questions which might be considered include: To what degree are medieval authors and artists reflective about the relative nature of monstrosity; to what degree do they gloss over this problem; and to what degree do they seem not to consider it as such, at all? Who is granted the power to name the monster? How were real groups impacted by external designations of monstrosity? In essence, we wish to examine the issue of cultural relativism as it impacts the construction of monsters in the Middle Ages. This session will be headlined by John Block Friedman, author of the seminal The Monstrous Races in Medieval Art and Thought, who will start off the discussion on cultural relativism with a look at the Middle French Secrets de l’Histoire Naturelle.

Abstracts of no more than 250 words should be sent to Asa Simon Mittman (asmittman@csuchico.edu)

Deadline for submissions to this session: September 15.

Any papers not included in this session will be forwarded to the Congress Committee for possible inclusion in the General Sessions.

Note, paper proposals will appear on the Mearcstapa blog: http://medievalmonsters.blogspot.com/

Through the Daemon’s Gate

2011-04-01T11:07:00.000-07:00

This new publication should be of interest to many listmembers. Click images for larger files:

Loss of language programs

2010-10-04T09:18:00.000-07:00

Hello all,

I am posting this at the request of MEARCSTAPA boardmember Kat Tracy. As a New Yorker (pay not attention to my current address), I am particularly saddened to see this national trend appearing in the SUNY system. I post this here in the interest of disseminating this information as widely as possible, so please pass the URL on to colleagues.

Best,

Asa

Dear Friends and Colleagues,

Today the seven members of the French faculty at SUNY--Albany (all tenured) were informed that by presidential decision, ostensibly for budgetary reasons, the French program has been "deactivated" at all levels (BA, MA, PhD), as have BA programs in Russian and Italian. The only foreign language program unaffected is Spanish. The primary criterion used in making the decision was undergrad majors-to-faculty ratio. We were told that tenured faculty in French, Russian, and Italian will be kept on long enough for our students to finish their degrees--meaning three years at the outside. Senoir faculty are being encouraged to take early retirement. The rest of us are being urged to "pursue our careers elsewhere," as our Provost put it.

Needless to say, the decision is personally devastating to those of us affected, but it is also symptomatic of the ongoing devaluation of foreign-language and other humanities program in universities across the United States. I'm writing to ask for your help in spreading the word

about this decision as widely as possible and in generating as much negative media publicity as possible against SUNY--Albany and the SUNY system in its entirety.

There is much background to add about how this decision was reached and implemented, too much for me to explain fully here. Suffice it to say that the disappearance of French, Italian, and Russian has resulted from an almost complete lack of leadership at the Albany campus and in the SUNY system. Our president, a former state pension fund manager, holds an MBA as his highest degree, has never held a college or university teaching position, and has never engaged in any kind of scholarship.

More disturbing still, due process was not followed in the decision-making process. The affected programs were not consulted or given the opportunity to propose money-saving reforms. Our Dean and Provost simply hand-selected an advisory committee to rubber stamp the president's decision. The legalities of the situation remain to be discussed with our union, UUP, but in the meantime I welcome any advice you may have.

Best,

Brett Bowles

Associate Professor of French Studies

Paper Submissions, KZoo 2011

2010-08-26T09:54:00.000-07:00

Below are the submissions for our Kalamazoo sessions in 2011. Shaping up to be an excellent crop, and it will be very hard to choose between them!

A Man With No Name: Disguise and Identity in the Tale of Outlaws

Lisa LeBlanc, Anna Maria College

Outlaws were considered the “other” in medieval society. Often referred to as bearing wolves’ heads, they lost their possessions, had no protection under the law and, in the early middle ages, could be killed with impunity, as a wolf could. In the outlaw tales of the Middle Ages, the main characters lost their positions in society and, in the case of outlaws from the upper class, their titles.

This otherness allows for flexibility of identity, and one characteristic of the outlaw tale is the use of disguise. In some cases, the characters borrow the identity of lower class laborers, even a prostitute. In others, the identity goes beyond occupation to physically changing one’s appearance or taking on a false name.

That the disguise motif appears often in outlaw tales is logical since the condemnation of someone as an outlaw essentially deprived the individual of identity as a citizen of the country. This paper will explore the slippery nature of identity in outlaw tales, looking at the interrelation of legal loss of identity as well as the creation of new, temporary identities by the outlaws.

_________________________________

Cyborgs in Shining Armor: Post-Human Knighthood in Medieval Romance

Rodger Wilkie, St. Thomas University

Cyborgs have been defined by Clynes and Kline as “self-regulating man-machine systems,” by Haraway as “the figure born of the interface of automaton and autonomy,” and by Hess as “any identity between machine and human or any conflation of the machine/human boundary.” What these definitions have in common is the configuration of the biological and the technological into a single system. Given the language of these and other definitions, it is not surprising that most discussions of cyborgs have focused upon periods post-dating the middle ages—periods in which the terms “machine” and, more basically “technology,” have been understood largely in contexts relevant to the industrial and post-industrial periods. And yet this quintessentially post-human figure is useful in understanding the relationship of the armored knight of medieval romance to the arms that he bears, and the role that these arms play in constructing a heroic identity.

The proposed paper will therefore discuss the armored knight of medieval Arthurian romance—specifically Perceval in Chretien’s Conte Du Graal, Gawain in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and Lancelot in Malory’s Morte D’Arthure—in the context of cyborg theory, and will argue that the hero of chivalric romance is in fact a cyborg. It will address Perceval’s changing understanding of arms in relation to knighthood, Gawain’s relationship to his armaments in preparation for his encounter with the Green Knight, and the role of armor in containing the instability embodied by Lancelot. The paper will then explore some interpretive possibilities offered by treating the romance hero as a cyborg, such as considering the hero as simultaneously agent and tool, viewing the hero as a figure straddling the human/machine border, and therefore understanding heroic identity as distributed across both biological and technological components, i.e. as partially prosthetic.

_________________________________

Dr. Larissa “Kat” Tracy, Longwood University

Title: ‘For Our dere Ladyes sake’: Bringing the Outlaw in from the Forest—Robin Hood, Marian, and Normative National Identity

Few outlaw tales are as popular or as persistent as the legend of Robin Hood that has made its way from fifteenth-century ballads to modern blockbuster films. Within this long tradition, Robin Hood is often associated with the fair Maid Marian, his love, his paramour, his inspiration; but in the earlier tradition of the outlaw tales, Maid Marian does not exist, Robin’s singular devotion, like that of King Arthur and Sir Gawain in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, is to the Virgin Mary. It is this association that normalizes Robin in the ballads and places him in an exalted, nationalist position—contrary to his construction as a border walker and outlaw. For fifteenth-century audiences, Robin’s devotion to Mary makes him a mainstream hero, on par with Arthurian tradition, and contradicts his marginal status that has been celebrated in modern popular culture. After the Reformation, in order to bring Robin in line with English concerns of national identity, the Virgin Mary is transformed in the early-modern period into a secular lover, Maid Marian. Through Robin’s devotion to, first the Virgin Mary, and then her secularized successor, Marian, the famous outlaw is presented to medieval and early-modern audiences not as a figure of liminality and transgression but as a normative construction of national and religious identity.

_________________________________

Monster, Hero, Outlaw: Reading Grettis saga through Beowulf

Joyce Tally Lionarons and Melissa Pankake, Ursinus College

The similarities between the monster fights in Beowulf and Grettis saga have been noted—and contested—by scholars for over a hundred and fifty years. Most have chosen to use Grettis saga to illuminate portions of Beowulf; the possible analogue has been employed tentatively to clarify the exact nature of Grendel’s mere, the details of Beowulf’s youth, and even the cause of his death. But what happens if we turn the lens around and try to use the massive library of Beowulf scholarship to illuminate Grettis saga? In this paper, we will not seek to prove that Grettir’s story is related to that of Beowulf and Grendel, but to discover how we can read Grettir under the assumption that he is related to the themes of monstrosity and exile which Beowulf and Grendel exemplify. The fact that Grettir is comparable both to Beowulf (as a hero) and Grendel (as a monster) points to the inverted, ambiguous place he occupies in the saga. When we examine the relationship between men and monsters in the two texts, a shared tradition emerges in which a Christian society dealing with its pagan past must alienate its monster hunters and identify them with what they fight. Like Beowulf, Grettis saga is concerned with the social situations and psychological qualities that can make monsters out of heroic men.

_________________________________

On the Formulation of a Plan: The Rhetoric of the Devil's Revenge in Genesis B

R. A. Burley, Boston College

After his fall from grace in the Old English Genesis B, the Devil finds himself exiled to Hell, brooding on his failure and plotting his revenge. Utterly powerless and chained in the pit, he still manages to cause the Fall of humankind. This paper argues that it is because of the rhetorical sophistication of his two speeches – especially his second, beginning at line 356 – that this is made possible. Through his eloquence, as defined by his use of larger rhetorical patterns, an exiled yet powerful Devil is created: one who is able to affect the course of events on Earth from his confinement beyond the borders of our world. In this way, then, the first outlaw and outsider becomes the very cause of unlawfulness and exile in humanity.

_________________________________

Loquelam animali dederas: St. Christopher and Definitions of Humanity in the Ninth and Tenth-Century

Melanie Kourbage, U. of Mass. Amherst

Today, St. Christopher is known as the kind-hearted giant who transported pilgrims over a river. Christopher’s identity as a cynocephalus, a dog-headed giant, was excised from his legend sometime between the late tenth and early thirteenth century. By the time Jacob de Voragine recorded Christopher’s tale in the Legenda Aurea in the late thirteenth century, few traces of Christopher’s cynocephalism remained. Though his cult could never boast of many shrines in Western Europe, the dog-headed version of St. Christopher achieved some popularity in the ninth and tenth centuries. No fewer than three hagiographical passiones, an anonymous prose passio from Fulda, a verse passio by Walther Speyer, and another anonymous verse passio, date from this period. The interest in Christopher stems from the usefulness of his legend in contemporary debates over the nature of humanity. Carolingians repeatedly asked: if the exotic races to the east exist, are they human? Did all races of men have souls, and if so, did the Christian west have an obligation to preach the gospels to them? In an age in which foreign invaders could seem less than human, these questions were timely and essential. For many scholars, cynocephali provided a convenient topic for discussing definitions of humanity. The passio Christophori contained in Cod. Vindobonensis 550 must be read in the context of contemporary discussion on the exotic races, as the anonymous hagiographer used this passio to comment humorously on the ontological questions of humanity and the folly of empty rhetoric.

________________________

Leslie Spitz-Edson, No Title Submitted

Along with the valkyrie, the berserker is one of the best-known "monsters" of the Viking Age. Unlike the valkyrie, however, who was most likely a construction of the male imagination (Jenny Jochens), the berserker seems to have been "real" – real enough, anyhow, to have been, at the beginning of the 11th century, forbidden by Jarl Erik of Lade to conduct certain activities that would "disturb the peace." (Grettis saga). According to early sources the berserker was a warrior and a shape-shifter who could morph into a bear or bear-like creature without warning, enter into an insensible, trancelike state, and rage with a lethal battle-lust that could be directed at friend or foe alike. While in this condition the berserker's superhuman strength and imperviousness to fear and pain made him an asset on the battlefield.

The connection with bears, which may have been attained during some sort of initiatory rite, bestowed upon these warriors superhuman strength and a unique position in the social order - after all the bear was the largest, most feared predator in the northern forests. However, the bear has other associations in the cultures of northern Europe, associations that tie it not only to combat, predation and death in this world, but also to fertility, rebirth and the supernatural. An exploration of these associations suggests that, while he was quite likely a liminal and somewhat unwelcome creature vis-à-vis society as a whole (particularly by the end of the Viking era), the special role that the berserker played can be seen as a key to the spirituality of the violent Viking age – a spirituality that, by the time of Jarl Erik's prohibition, was being swiftly disavowed.

________________________

Sandra Ballif Straubhaar, University of Texas at Austin

To Kiss or Not to Kiss: The Polysemic Finngálkn in the Legendary Sagas

Two ambiguous female figures in the late-medieval Icelandic legendary sagas are called finngálkn -- a rare word for a fabulous monster which has come down into modern Icelandic as a designation for "centaur," but seems originally to divide up into pieces meaning "Finnish/Lappish" (i.e., exotic, foreign) and "frightful thing." In both cases the finngálkn has some human body parts and some beastly ones (fangs, a tail and talons in one case; hooves, a tail and a horse's snout in the other). Both of these female monsters can crossbreed with humans, since one has already done it -- she is the mother of a particularly nasty, hero-threatening antagonist -- and one will become the major love-interest for the saga's hero. This second beast-monster, the more benign of the two, also bears gifts -- notably a powerful sword intended for the hero, which he has already foreseen in a dream; but, as it turns out, he must kiss her horsey lips before she will part with it. The hero and the finngálkn then have a poetic conversation wherein the hero worries that his human lips will stick fast to her equine ones; but, as it turns out, they don't, and the prize weapon is his.

I intend to compare and contrast the two legendary saga narratives -- one from Örvar-Odds saga and one from Hjálmþés saga -- with an eye toward their respective presentations of the finngálkn. Was the original saga audience meant to assume that such beast-monsters were common in foreign lands of adventure and quest, or would they simply construe them as fabulous elements in a fantastic story? Were these figures possibly meant to be construed as ordinary human women under magical spells? Questions like these, and others, will be the focus of my presentation.

________________________

Andrew Salzmann, Boston College

Banishing the Monstrous: The Efficacy of the Sign of the Cross in Jacob de Voraigne’s Golden Legend and the Semiotics of Edmond Ortigues

Jacobus de Voraigne’s Golden Legend recounts many standard examples of Christian belief in the cross and resurrection of Christ overcoming malicious supernatural forces: Such exorcisms, healings, and spiritual victories are consonant with similar accounts in the Gospel narratives, and to see such achievements continued in the lives of the saints would delight, but not surprise, the medieval reader. However, The Golden Legend also recounts a few examples in which saints invoke the cross to neutralize threats to the natural worldly order: Living and breathing animal (or humanoid) monsters. While it would not be surprising that the God of Abraham and Isaac, the almighty God who struck down the Canaanites, could cast down similarly physical foes, the accounts of the Golden Legend depict victory over the monstrous as the work of the saint and the sign of the cross, not as a direct divine intervention. De Voraigne worked with received texts to craft his Golden Legend, and some degree of acceptance of the veracity of these texts was a pre-requisite for his project; nonetheless, de Voraigne still must have found these received stories of the cross’s power over the natural world probable for some reason. This paper is dedicated to uncovering the logic by which the cross promotes and defends the natural, and not only the supernatural, order.

French philosopher and theorist Edmond Ortigues (1917-2005) has influenced a generation of psychologists, anthropologists, historians, and—particularly through the work of Louis-Marie Chauvet—theologians. Ortigues’ Le discours et le symbole (1962) postulated that the difference between sign and symbol is that the sign refers to some referent other than itself, whereas the symbol “introduc[es] us into an order to which it itself belongs.” Thus, a Soviet ruble which has ceased to function as a sign—an item which referred to a socially-established value of purchasing power—may still nonetheless function as a symbol: In the hands of someone familiar with the entire complex of Soviet imagery and meaning, the coin—its words, its designs—allows the now-distant Soviet world to reassert itself to its view and allows its viewer to re-enter that world.

If we realize that for de Voraigne’s work and for the texts and authors upon which de Voraigne’s accounts of saints vanquishing worldly monsters drew Christianity had become completely normative, then it is not surprising that a Christian symbol such as the sign of the cross—which owes its functioning to its ability to draw those acquainted with its meaning into the symbolic order of Christianity—would become efficacious in the expulsion or neutralization of the monstrous in the natural order. While classically entrance into the cross and resurrection of Christ through Christian symbols was efficacious in countering the supernaturally demonic, the more the Christian order is aligned with the natural order the more an appeal to Christian symbols to effect and restore the Christian symbolic order would believable effect and restore the natural order itself. The more strongly Christianity is identified with the standard natural order, the more efficacious the cross would become in banishing deviations from that natural order.

One might wonder whether Christian symbols would retain this expulsionary power in the face of the naturally monstrous today. In light of a growing exposure to and appreciation of “the Other” in its modern history, it is my hope that, faced with the frighteningly but this-worldly “Other,” Christian symbols will have lost—or out grown—this “protective” or punitive power.

________________________

Julie Bieber, The University of Delaware
Monstrous Spaces: The Fairies of Sir Orfeo on the Edge of the Medieval World

Using J.B. Friedman’s classification of the monstrous races and Michael Camille’s discussion of medieval marginalia, this paper will discuss the fairy world and its location in the romance of Sir Orfeo. The paper argues that the realm of fairies, and the realm of the monstrous, can be considered a liminal space that offers commentary on human society because of its unique position. The fairy world is also defined by the thirteenth- and fourteenth-century debates over the physical placement of purgatory and other mystical spaces. Monsters are always located on the edges of the world in medieval maps, and the fairies of Sir Orfeo also live somewhere between the human world and the spiritual world. The placement of the fairy world exposes both social and folkloric concerns with the placement of the “other.” Because of Sir Orfeo’s folkloric motifs, the text draws heavily upon Celtic and Welsh literary depictions of the otherworld. The fairy world in Sir Orfeo contains the residual, Welsh idea of the “not-world,” separate yet near human society. Like the marginal images that decorate the texts of many medieval manuscripts, fairyland is close enough that it can provide commentary on the human civilization, yet far enough away that it is located on the “edges” of the known. Monsters exist to break down the boundaries of what is human, so the place where monsters exist can also break down the boundaries between “here” and “far away.” The fairyland of Sir Orfeo is a unique space in Middle English literature because of its near-yet-far location situated on the periphery of human consciousness.

________________________

Kristin Noone
University of California, Riverside

Robin Hood and the Irish Knife: Outlaws, Monstrosity, and (Literal) Defacement

In the fifteenth-century ballad "Robin Hood and Guy of Gisbourne," Robin uses an "Iryssh knife" to enact gruesome vengeance on his foe: “Robin pulled forth an Irish kniffe/and nicked Sir Guy in the face,/that hee was never on a woman borne/cold tell who Sir Guy was.” The “Irish knife,” the only weapon specifically identified in the ballad as having a foreign origin, is the weapon used to literally deface Sir Guy’s corpse Though not the weapon that directly kills Sir Guy, it is this foreign weapon that eliminates his identity, suggesting concerns about foreignness and outsiders that enter even into the idyllic greenwood space: this is a monstrous act, one that strips away human appearance and flesh. The Irish knife, unlike the unmarked sword that Robin uses to actually kill his adversary, stands out here as a more powerful weapon, carried by the outlaw against English knighthood (Robin, the forest-dweller, defeating the man referred to as Sir Guy twice in the four-line stanza describing the defacement). Throughout the ballad, the Irish knife acts as a weapon against human identity and human constructed authority, and introduces an anxiety about the monstrous nature of the foreigner, which becomes powerfully linked with the world of the outlaw in the heart of the England, the wild greenwood.

________________________

Beth Sutherland
Infinite Deferral and Endless Adventure: Mandeville’s Travels Down the Via Negativa

Few critics have attempted to read Mandeville’s Travels as a theological project—as a map to God. I propose that, despite the spectacle coursing throughout the narrative, the text assumes a paradoxically apophatic attitude towards discovery.
The Other has long dominated Mandevillean scholarship, but a closer look at the text suggests that the most shocking thing about travel is the perpetually ‘new’ worlds behind the Other. Far more tantalizing than the spectacle of Travels is that which the author tells us he cannot tell us. Our explorer-subject subtly weaves allusions to inaccessible lands into a larger tale of wondrous sights and adventure. Whether a city cloaked in darkness, a place beyond the forbidding Gravelly Sea, an island of even larger giants beyond a land of ‘smaller’ giants, or Paradise itself—unreachable locations pepper Mandeville’s Travels. One might counter that this unknowability gets balanced by the concretization of holiness in Jerusalem itself. Each of the holy sites/objects, however, relies on empty space for its significance—such as the Sepulcher, the Ark, and imprints left in the ground by holy bodies. Paralleling the impenetrability of lands on the brink of Mandeville’s world, the center itself offers no direct conduit to Truth. These inaccessible places and hollow spaces call for an invocation of negative theological thought, even allowing us to read Travels as itself a theological project. This paper makes use of the works of the Pseudo-Dionysius, the Cloud-poet, and Jacques Derrida to flesh out the nature of Mandeville’s apophasis.

________________________

“Men and Monsters: Who’s Who in the Late Medieval ‘Fortress of Faith’”
Brooke Falk, Rutgers University

In the medieval Christian mind, clear distinctions among non-Christians often failed to exist. “Others,” including but not limited to Jews and Muslims, shared ugly physiognomies, visual manifestations of their social deviance as imagined by Christians. The perceived malignancy of non-Christians transformed them into a monstrous species. The “Fortress of Faith,” a Latin Franciscan text of around 1460 drew on this phenomenon explicitly linking the actions and appearances of heretics, Jews, Muslims and demons through both word and image. The “Fortress of Faith,” or Fortalitium fidei, and its subsequent copies intentionally conflated and dehumanized non-Christians and encouraged their expulsion from Christendom. This paper uses the “Fortress of Faith” to explore the medieval boundaries between humans and non-humans in relation to religion and race.

The text records a scathing list of crimes allegedly committed against the Church by its enemies. Three discrete volumes address heretics, Jews and Muslims, while a final volume is devoted to demons. Images of a fortress under siege punctuate the text and allegorically represent Christianity’s daily struggle to defend itself against the unfaithful. This message was received with widespread popularity due to contemporary Christian zeal and the work’s emergence at the pivotal moment when manuscripts and printed books were simultaneously produced. The various methods of production yielded variety in imagery, but both painted illuminations and colored woodcuts effectively convey the universal threat that non-Christians seemingly posed against Christian society. Most manuscript illuminations depict one enemy attacking the castle, but human and demon gestures indicate equally violent physical assaults. Woodcuts present the enemies in a single image; heretics attempt to uproot the fortress as their cohort outsiders observe. Both types of images and the text of the “Fortress of Faith” present non-Christians as demonic creatures of Christian destruction, blurring the biological distinction between medieval man and monster.

________________________
Valerie Gramling
University of Massachusetts Amherst

“If anyone should slay this animal, would he be called a homicide?”:
Giraldus Cambrensis and the Werewolves of Ossory

In Giraldus Cambrensis’ The Topography of Ireland, he tells of a priest who is asked to give last rites to a woman in the guise of a wolf, the result of a curse placed on her people by Saint Natalis (every seven years, a man and a woman of Ossory must agree to become wolves; should they survive, they can then be transformed back while others take their place). Considering these transformed creatures, Cambrensis asks if they are more animal or human since they retain their reason despite their bestial appearances. This tension between inner and outer identity is common to many werewolf stories, yet Cambrensis emphasizes the border between those identities by allowing the she-wolf’s skin to be pulled back, revealing the woman within, and then refitted to its original shape. Through this act of undressing and redressing, Cambrensis suggests that her bestial appearance does not touch or alter the human within, yet a later confession by the he-wolf that his nation is sinful and deserving of punishment challenges an easy distinction between inner and outer appearances.
In this presentation, I use Cambrensis’ werewolf story and the somatic anxieties it raises to consider the role of skin in defining and delineating the nature of a creature whether human or beast. Comparing this story with other contemporary werewolf tales, I look at how the medieval werewolf was constructed and the frequent role that clothing or skin played in its conception. Finally, I engage with Cambrensis’ question “If anyone should slay this animal, would he be called a homicide?” Though Cambrensis responds by suggesting the question should remain unanswered, I consider the implications of his werewolf’s hybridity, and how its removable skin can be read as both a border separating beast from human as well as a covering that encompasses both.

An Open Letter to MAA

2010-08-19T07:17:00.001-07:00

An Open Letter to MAA:

As the executive committee of MEARCSTAPA, an organization with more than fifty members, focused on the study of monstrosity in the Middle Ages, we wish to speak out both against the recent group of laws passed in Arizona (primarily the now-infamous SB SB1070, but also HB HB2281 banning the teaching of ethnic studies and also the AZ Department of Education's new move to bar teachers with "heavy accents" from teaching English). We also wish to voice our opposition to the Medieval Academy's refusal to relocate the conference from Tempe, despite these offensive laws. We draw the name for our organization from the Old English for "Border-Walker," a term used to confer monstrosity on Grendel and his mother. We are troubled by the intensification of the rhetoric that is applied to the peoples living on both sides of our own borders, and on the rampant use of terms to dehumanize these people ("illegals," "aliens," "anchor-babies," etc.).

We specialize, as a group, in the study of the construction of otherness, and our collective examination of history shows all too clearly the tangible, bodily effects that this process inevitably has. Once a group of people has been repeatedly depicted as not quite human, their mistreatment is to be expected. We cannot stand silently while these acts occur, as to do so would be, through our silence, to voice our implicit consent. The history of assaults on Jews, Muslims, Africans, Indians, women, and on, throughout the Middle Ages and beyond, begins in each case with dehumanizing language and laws.

Despite an understanding of the financial ramifications that a full boycott might have had on MAA, we feel that matters of conscience are of greater significance. We also feel that the numbers of the recent poll have been misinterpreted, and their presentation misleading. That 32.7% of poor academics were willing to to give money to NOT attend a conference, in order to voice their solidarity in opposition to the blatant racism of these laws, speaks to the depth of their conviction. This is quite a high number, and probably overlaps with the 42% who voted to cancel the meeting altogether. Three-quarters of those who voted to cancel are willing to put their money where their mouths are, and that certainly should count for something. We are in a very homogenous field, and this collective action taken by MAA reinforces this. MAA had an opportunity to send a message to students interested in the field that the medievalist community is inclusive and welcoming. Instead, it has sent the opposite message. For a strong letter on this, see "The General's" guest post on Quod She.

What is at issue both in these laws and in the responses to them is perception. Otherness -- monstrosity, even -- is, of course, entirely a matter of perception: The idea that anyone "looks like an immigrant," or than there is anyone who does not speak with "a heavy accent" is rooted in the idea that the perspective (or appearance or accent) of the dominant group is not a perspective, at all. But so, too, all of the good intentions of those who argue that attendance of the meeting in AZ is the more helpful, ethical choice does not impact the perception of those who see this as an expression of unconcern with the rights of minorities.

If the Medieval Academy of America persist in holding the conference in Arizona, we the executive committee will boycott the meeting, and those of us currently members will withdraw our membership in the Academy, though we shall do so with regret, as we find the Academy's meetings to be excellent venues for the discussion of scholarship. With this letter, we voice our solidarity with those members of medievalist community in Arizona who have spoken out so eloquently about the need for this boycott. We will encourage our membership to do the same.

Sincerely,

Asa Simon Mittman, Chico State

Jeff Massey, Molloy College

Larissa Tracy, Longwood University

Derek Newman-Stille, Trent University

Renee Ward, Wilfrid Laurier University

The following MEARCSTAPA members also asked to be added as signatory:

Frances Auld, University of Wisconsin-Baraboo/Sauk Co.

Robyn Cadwallader, Flinders University

Jeffrey J Cohen, George Washington University

Jill Frederick, Minnesota State University, Moorhead

Spyridon Gkounis, Ionian University, Corfu

Ana Grinberg, University of California, San Diego

Diane Heath, University of Kent

Marcus Hensel, University of Oregon

Norman Hinton, University of Illinois-Springfield

Eileen A. Joy, Southern Illinois University Edwardsville

Lisa LeBlanc, Anna Maria College

Dana M. Oswald, University of Wisconsin-Parkside

Karl Steel, Brooklyn College, CUNY

Debra Higgs Strickland, University of Glasgow

Kevin Teo, University of Calgary

Rodger Wilkie, St. Thomas University

Mary Williams, San Jose State University

Diane Wolfthal, Rice University

Aimeric Vacher, International School of Geneva

Note: This letter was forwarded to the Councillors of the Medieval Academy of America. Elizabeth (Peggy) Brown, Fellow and Former President of MAA replied to us as follows:

Dear Asa, Jeff, Larissa, Derek, and Renee,
Thank you for your thoughtful and thought-provoking message, which at your request I am sending to all members of the Council of the Academy, voting and non-voting. I know I speak for them all in expressing gratitude for the time and effort you invested in writing your statement, in posting it on your website, and in sending it to us. Likewise, I know I speak for them in expressing our hope that you will reconsider your decision to resign from the Academy.
The members of the Executive Committee knew that the decision which was reached was bound to be controversial, given the different opinions expressed through the poll. We made the decision for the reasons we expressed in our announcement. The decision did not encourage, discourage, or mandate attendance. To attend or not to attend is a matter for individuals to decide for themselves. For members, the decision will not involve a financial penalty, as it would have done for the Academy had the Executive Committee canceled the meeting. Subsequent to the announcement of the decision on 3 August, the Executive Committee has learned that by MA statute, a quorum of the Council can be present through telephone conference.
Again, thank you for setting forth the views of your members and for sending them to us.
With every good wish, Peggy

Different Visions

2010-08-03T08:55:00.000-07:00

The "Monstrosity" issue of Different Visions is now live! Guest-edited by Debra Higgs Strickland and me, it contains articles by Susan M. Kim (co-authored with me), Dana Oswald, Rosalyn Saunders, Suzanne Lewis, and Debra. It is free and open access, so you should all check it out! This grew out of a MEARCSTAPA session at Leeds, and is a great result of our collective work!

KZoo 2011 CFP

2010-07-07T01:55:00.000-07:00

The 46th International Congress on Medieval Studies
Kalamazoo, MI (as ever)
May 12-15, 2011

Panel 1:
Outlaws, Outliers, and Outsiders

This panel explores the intersection of myth and reality, of boundaries and borders between this world, other worlds and their inhabitants. From tales of outlaws exiled by law to those who lurk on the boundaries of "civilization," this panel welcomes papers on all manner of outsiders in any genre.

Panel 2:
Prehuman, Nonhuman, Posthuman: Monsters in the Middle Ages

This panel explores the concept of monstrosity in the Middle Ages, as well as connections between understandings of the monstrous in the medieval and all subsequent periods. Submissions are welcome on all aspects of the monstrous in all fields of study from the medieval to modern medievalism.

Send abstracts via email to:

Renee Ward
rmward@ualberta.ca
rward@wlu.ca

Leeds Business Meeting

2010-07-05T08:27:00.000-07:00

To the folks going to Leeds: MEARCSTAPA (link below for the uninitiated) will host its annual "business" meeting at the Stables Pub on Monday evening, following our pair of sessions:

Exploring the Monstrous, I: Constructions of Identity:
Monday 12 July 2010: 14.15-15.45
Exploring the Monstrous, II: Geographies of the
...Monstrous
Monday 12 July 2010: 16.30-18.00

Looking forward to seeing you all there!

babel conference CFP

2010-06-02T14:57:00.000-07:00

Laurynn Lowe and I are interested in putting together a panel for the 1st Biennial Meeting of the BABEL Working Group, details here. babel is a sort-of sister organization to MEARCSTAPA, and I am sure many of you have already seen their excellent first publication, postmedieval.

The conference is:
after the end: medieval studies, the humanities, and the post-catastrophe 4-6 November 2010 University of Texas at Austin

Following Jeffery Jerome Cohen's meditation on stones and Susan Signe Morrison's call for a /fecopoet[h]ics/ in the inaugural edition of /Post/medieval/, this panel is an exploration the boundaries of the inanimate. How do we understand the inanimate objects that make up our world as (1) stones, bridging the gap between our frailty and their seeming eternity, as (2) waste products to be eliminated from consciousness, or finally as (3) tools, whose existence would seem predicated upon the use of man? In what ways does our relationship with things define our relationship with ourselves and others? How do we define the inanimate objects in our environment, and how does this definition in turn restrict or expand our understanding of the human? How might the brass horse in the "Squire's Tale" or the Mechanical Turk be understood as bridging the boundary between the inanimate and animal studies or orientalists perspectives? How might Graham Harman's Tool-being be understood in terms of the speaking objects in the Book of Exeter or the Dream of the Rood? If things are simply part of the architecture of our environment, invisible if functioning correctly, why then do tools come to have voices? If an object is only genuinely visible to us when broken, why does the fantasy of magical objects persist in romances and epics? Finally, how can these examples from medieval literature shed light on our present relationships with things?

As of now, this panel is open ideas. While it is possible, of course, to follow a traditional format in which 3 papers are presented, we could also take advantage of the freedom granted by the BABEL conference to host a selection of speakers who would read one the other panelists paper prior to the panel, and come prepared to discuss.

2010-05-31T08:14:00.000-07:00

The 2009 issue of Hortulus: The Online Graduate Journal of Medieval Studies is now available!.

The theme of this year's volume was 'Monsters and Monstrosities in the Middle Ages'. We are delighted to offer all our readers three diverse articles and three book reviews on essential works relating to this topic.

To celebrate the fifth issue of Hortulus and to help maintain our website, we are pleased to announce the launch of print copies of all five volumes of the journal. These may be purchased on Lulu.

Many thanks from all the staff at Hortulus.
hortulus@hortulus.net

SEMA Session Proposal 2010

2010-05-25T09:55:00.000-07:00

Here is our session proposal for SEMA. Thanks to Kat Tracy for organizing and thanks to our members for these great paper proposals!

SEMA Session Proposal 2010

Session Title: Dead and Loving it in the Middle Ages: The Walking, Talking Dead and Undead

Session Sponsor: MEARCSTAPA

Organizer/Presider: Larissa Tracy, Longwood University

Papers:

The Gates on the Fringes: Sicily and Ireland as Doorways to the Underworld

Ana Grinberg, University of California, San Diego,

In this paper I will further explore Le Goff’s treatment about the location of the purgatory in Ireland and Sicily, mentioned in his The Birth of Purgatory, mainly looking into sources for “Saint Patrick’s Purgatory” and the legend of King Arthur’s palace in Mt. Etna. I find that these gates into the underworld are not only of “considerable importance” (Le Goff 198), I would also claim that they are the fringes of a geographical construction of the western Christian world. This spatial conception, related to medieval mappae mundi as ideological depiction of the surrounding world, enables a definition of “European-ness” as opposed to multiple Others. Sicily and Ireland were territory to pagans and/or heathens sharing a history of invasion by the Normans. Why do these places refer to groups of dead or undead? How are those groups related to peripheries?

“I’m Not Dead Yet”: Patterns of Victim Agency in Medieval Literature

Melissa Ridley Elmes, The Carlbrook School

Secular medieval literature often incorporates scenes in which corrupt, tyrannical, or power-hungry individuals or groups, usually of the ruling classes, inflict pain and death upon their predominantly socially and politically inferior victims. Despite vastly differing origins and purposes in the presentation and propagation of violence, there is a discernible pattern concerning the evolution of its portrayal in texts as regards victim’s agency. As Britain develops from a loose confederation of various pagan societies into a unified feudal state ruled by a powerful Christian nobility, the voice of minority groups frequently victimized as a result of conquest and assimilation – pagans, women, children, and Jews – is limited more and more, until such victims are without agency and at the mercy of a nobility increasingly distanced from their violent reality. In this paper, I examine the shift from pagan to Christian constructions of the victim of violence in medieval British texts, focusing on the presence – or lack thereof – of victim’s agency in the face of violence.  

Speaking For, To, and Via the Dead in Tudor England

Thea Cervone, University of Southern California

Even as the Reformation developed and peaked, establishing a dialogue with the dead, or with other powers for the sake of the dead, remained important in many facets of religion, literature, and academic thought during the Tudor era. Henry VII intended to translate the remains of Henry VI to his newly-constructed chapel at Westminster so that the two might lie together in death, communing and communicating both inside and outside the grave. Henry VIII’s ban on Purgatory changed ritual behavior but not attitudes toward the dead and their ability to speak, or listen. Ludwig Lavater wrote, in the 1560s, that spirits communicated to the living by way of God’s will, and Satan’s behest. As such, they could not be ignored. Other Reformers disagreed, stating that funerary monuments provided the living with all they needed for successful communication with the dead. John Donne, who designed his own funerary monument—and hung a sketch of it in his study—perhaps agreed. His poetry reveals his desire to speak to his future readers not merely through his poetry, but by way of his disinterred remains. This paper will examine these and other situations in which communication with the dead, and for their sake, emerges as a profound but ironic reaction to the banning of the Doctrine of Purgatory, and the system of intercession and avowery that revolved around patron saints.

Session proposals for KZoo 2011

2010-05-21T16:20:00.000-07:00

Hello all! Here are three proposals for KZoo 2011, ask very kindly put together by Renee Ward, after some discussions. (And props to her for the wonderful neologism of terato-sexuality!) Comments welcome, but the must come in quickly. Send any comments to the MEARCSTAPA list

Panel Suggestion 1:
Outlaws, Outliers, and Outsiders

This panel explores the intersection of myth and reality, of boundaries and borders between this world, other worlds and their inhabitants. From tales of outlaws exiled by law to those who lurk on the boundaries of "civilization," this panel welcomes papers on all manner of outsiders in any genre.

Panel Suggestion 2:
All Sexed Up: Monstrosity, Gender, and Sexuality

This panel explores the relationships between monstrosity, gender, and sexuality in medieval art, literature, and culture. Submissions are welcome that discuss issues of gender confusion, androgyny, gender transgressions (such as cross-dressing) and transformation (real or metaphoric), and other examples of terato-sexuality in the Middle Ages.

Panel Suggestion 3:
Prehuman, Nonhuman, Posthuman: Monsters in the Middle Ages

This panel explores the concept of monstrosity in the Middle Ages, as well as connections between understandings of the monstrous in the medieval and all subsequent periods. Submissions are welcome on all aspects of the monstrous in all fields of study from the medieval to modern medievalism.

CFP MEARCSTAPA Session at the Southeastern Medieval Association

2010-05-10T19:06:00.001-07:00

Hello everyone!

This is a Call for Papers for a MEARCSTAPA Session at the Southeastern Medieval Association, November 18-20, 2010 in Roanoke, VA.

This year's conference is sponsored and hosted by a number of brilliant universities in the area, so it will be a fabulous conference.

Check out the details here:
http://www.rc.vt.edu/medieval/sema2010

The MEARCSTAPA session is titled:

Dead and Loving it in the Middle Ages: The Walking, Talking Dead and Undead.

We have one fabulous paper already, and I need two more for a full set. So if you have an abstract for a paper on the dead, the undead, the silent dead, the noisy dead, the annoying dead, death, disease... anything, well deadly (or undeadly), please send it to me by May 25.

Again, please send abstracts to me: kattracy@comcast.net by May 25.

Please include your name and affiliation, paper title and a short (250 words) abstract.

Thanks very much! I look forward to hearing from you all.

best,
Kat

MAP 2010 wrap up

2010-03-07T11:40:00.000-08:00

Marcus Hensel and I joined forces to co-sponsor two MEARCSTAPA sessions at the Medieval Association of the Pacific meeting, hosted by the University of the Puget Sound in Tacoma, WA. Our two sessions served as brackets for the whole conference, with the one in the first time slot and the other in the last.

Both sessions were strong successes (though we were sorry that a family tragedy prevented Heather Bamford from joining us). The first session, "Silences and Gaps: The Missing Monsters," was therefore composed of Laurynn Lowe and myself, chaired by Marcus. Laurynn spoke on "Re-Membering Monsters: The Nature of Traits in Wolfram’s Parzival," and I delivered "Maps without Monsters," and used a bit of our extra time to briefly demonstrate the prototype of the Digital Mappaemundi project.

The second session was "Naming, Knowing and Remembering Monsters," chaired by me and having the following papers: "Can the Monster Speak?: Silence and the Grendelkin’s Status as Monsters," by Marcus, "The Monstrous and Modified Heroism in Beowulf," by John Hill and finally "Wulfstan’s Werewolf," Joyce Lionarons.

Both sessions were well attended and featured lively, productive and positive Q&As afterward. In both cases, we could have gone on for well more time than was allotted for the sessions. Many thanks to the participants and attendees! I hope that we can add MAP to our regular slate of conferences for MEARCSTAPA sessions! Now, we lope onward, down the misty slopes, toward KZoo and then Leeds.

Hortulus Monsters CFP

2010-01-12T14:13:00.000-08:00

Please find attached the call for papers for the 2009 edition of Hortulus: The Online Graduate Journal of Medieval Studies. Our upcoming issue will be devoted to representations and interpretations of monsters and monstrosities in art, chronicles, letters, literature, and music from the Middle Ages. It would be appreciated if you would post this information on your blog and forward it to any interested students etc. Further information is available at here.

Please contact me with any questions or inquires,
Many thanks,
Grace Windsor, co-editor.

MAP Sessions Accepted

2009-11-28T20:13:00.000-08:00

More good news! Marcus Hensel and I submitted a pair of unofficially Mearcstapa-ish sessions to the Medieval Association of the Pacific, which were both accepted. These should be great sessions, and I hope some of the Western members will be in attendance. MAP puts on a good conference -- very friendly and collegial. Information is here. Our sessions are as follows:

Session: Silences and Gaps: The Missing Monsters -- Friday Session I
Session Presider: Marcus Hensel (student)

Speaker 1
Laurynn Lowe, Independent Scholar: Re-Membering Monsters: The Nature of Traits in Wolfram's Parzival

Speaker 2
Asa Simon Mittman, Chico State: Maps without Monsters

Speaker 3
Heather Bamford, University of California, Berkeley: Monster Esthetics, Material Monsters: Representing and Presenting Monsters in the Libro del conosçimiento de todos los reinos,
manuscript Z

Session: Naming, Knowing and Remembering Monsters—Session VIII (Saturday)
Session Presider: Asa Simon Mittman, Chico State

Speaker 1
Marcus Hensel, University of Oregon: Can the Monster Speak?: Silence and the Grendelkin’s Status as Monsters

Speaker 2
Joyce Lionarons, Ursinus College: Wulfstan’s Werewolf

Speaker 3
John Hill, U.S. Naval Academy: The Monstrous and Modified Heroism in Beowulf

Mearcstapa is heading back to Leeds

2009-11-28T19:39:00.001-08:00

Good news! We have just heard back from the selection committee at Leeds, and our two sessions have been accepted, again. This will be our third run there, in an many years. This summer, our sessions will again be excellent. Here are the lineups:

Session 218
Session Time: Mon. 12 July - 14.15-15.45

Title: Exploring the Monstrous, I: Constructions of Identity
Abstract: This is one of two sessions on monsters and monstrosity submitted by MEARCSTAPA. The year's theme of Travel and Exploration is a perfect fit with our interest in monstrosity, a concept frequently linked to geography in the Middle Ages. These three papers focus on clothing, armor, and gender in constructions of monstrosity. The papers will interrogate the issue of where identity lies, on the outside or the inside, in the interior individual, in its body, or even in the clothing by which it is covered. In all cases, the construction of monsters bears important implications for our understandings of medieval notions of the human.

Moderator/Chair Jeff Massey, Molloy College, New York

Paper -a Queering Mandeville's Female Monsters: Transformative, Transgender, Transsexual
Speaker: Dana Oswald, Department of English, University of Wisconsin, Parkside

Paper -b 'The angels men complain of': Monstrous Masculinity in La Conte du Graal
Speaker: Karma de Gruy, Department of English, Emory University, Georgia

Paper -c Living Large and Leaving the Liminal: The Giant Saint and the Incarnation in the South English Legendary's Life of St Christopher
Speaker: Christopher Maslanka, University of Wisconsin, Madison

Session 318
Session Time: Mon. 12 July - 16.30-18.00

Title: Exploring the Monstrous, II: Geographies of the Monstrous
Abstract: This is one of two sessions on monsters and monstrosity submitted by MEARCSTAPA. The year's theme of Travel and Exploration is a perfect fit with our interest in monstrosity, a concept frequently linked to geography in the Middle Ages. These three papers focus on the geography of the monstrous, examining how the location of monsters impacted medieval concepts of monstrosity and identity. We will address not only accounts of people traveling to distant monsters, but also texts, images and maps, in which the monsters themselves are the travelers. The papers will address how maps were integrated into medieval understandings of location, identity, and even narrative structure.

Moderator/Chair Larissa Tracy, Department of English & Modern Languages, Longwood University, Virginia

Paper -a Monstrum viator: The Travelling Monsters of Herzog Ernst
Speaker: Debra Higgs Strickland, Glasgow Centre for Medieval & Renaissance Studies, University of Glasgow

Paper -b 'On what maner he myght dyscrivyn hit aryght': Tundale, Monsters, and the Mappaemundi
Speaker: Michelle Kustarz, Wayne State University, Michigan

Paper -c Navigating the Margins: Sources, Analogs, Wandering Monsters, and the Digital Mappaemundi
Speaker: Asa Mittman, Department of Art & Art History, California State University, Chico

Mearcstapa goes South

2009-11-02T21:22:00.000-08:00

Hi all,

I would like to report briefly on a MEARCSTAPA-related trip. This weekend I went to Tennessee for the first annual MART (Medieval And Renaissance Teaching) conference, sponsored by Carson-Newman College. The conference, with the occult-related theme of "The Monstrous Middle Ages and the Wretched Renaissance" was housed--for maximum irony, it would seem--at the Carson Springs Baptist Conference Center:

The setting, in the rural Smokey Mountains, was quite stunning and bucolic, and the deep porches, filled with rocking chairs, were ideal for viewing the fall foliage.

Nick Deford--my native guide and generous host, and the main designer of MEARCSTAPA's wonderful logo--and I took full advantage. Nothing like a fine, rustic country setting, but with free wireless.

There were many interesting papers, and I gave the keynote address, entitled "Can Monsters Really Take Up Half of My Survey Syllabus?" (The answer, of course, was "Yes!") Other papers covered witchcraft, the Reformation (Luther as a 7-headed monster), hermaphrodites, and the Inquisition.

The real highlight, though, was dinner at the Front Porch, which bills itself as a Hillybilly Mexican restaurant. Rather surprisingly good enchiladas accompanied by a live bluegrass duo. The joint is in Cosby, TN, which looked like a good town to find moonshine for sale. Really.

This was all good enough, but then (and I suppose that the fact that it was the day before Halloween probably played a role, here), in walked a nine-year-old zombie named London:

Here she is, talking with me. This is the little monster responding to my assertion that I was a "monster expert." When I called her a zombie, she pointed out that she was a girl, not a zombie, and, to prove this, she said "If I was a zombie, wouldn't I be eatin' your brains right now?" QED. She was already fabulous enough, but then, still in costume, she took to the stage and, accompanied by the bluegrass guys, sang Lee Greenwood's jingoistic "God Bless the USA," to the general delight of the crowd:

All was going well until she got to the part about New York (my homeland):

... To the hills of Tennessee
... Across the plains of Texas
... From sea to shining sea
... From Detroit down to Houston
... And New York to LA

After "Houston," she stopped, well, dead (get it? zombie?). She just couldn't get out those next words. I have never been to anywhere that was more foreign to me than Cosby, Tennessee, but it was all absolutely monstrous, and therefore all tremendous fun. I felt like every cell in my body was inscribed with an interlocking "NY."

My thanks to Mary Baldridge and L. Kip Wheeler for organizing the conference and inviting me out to spread the Gospel of Monsters! And to Nick, for hosting me for a bonus talk at UT, while I was in the area. Which brings me to my final note. The University of Tennessee has the skeleton of a centaur. Yes, that's what I said. Don't believe me? Check it out here! Now I know what to ask my dean for this holiday season.

Submissions for LEEDS 2010

2009-09-21T15:41:00.000-07:00

The first few are in! I hope for many more!

___________________________________

Debra Strickland
University of Glasgow

Monstrum viator: The Travelling Monsters of Herzog Ernst

This paper will examine relationships between monsters, clothing, and travel in the late medieval German epic-romance, Herzog Ernst. In this gripping tale of conquest and crusade, Duke Ernst and his knights, on their way to fight the ‘heathen’ in the Holy Land, experience sequential encounters with different monstrous groups as they travel across the exotic East. The Crane Men, One-Stars, Flat-Hooves, Pygmies and Giants all have their separate agendas that the Duke and his knights either thwart or facilitate. That is, while the hostile monsters are annihilated, others are friendly and even in need of military defence, which the Duke and his men honourably provide. Most amazingly, the knights learn to speak ‘Arimaspi’, and a number of the monsters forsake their homelands to follow the crusaders to the Holy Land. While for some of them, this is the last stop, a select few of the monsters accompany the knights back to Bavaria and to the imperial court to begin a new life in the Holy Roman Empire.

Besides violating convention by moving the monsters from East to West, the tale places an unusual emphasis on their highly sophisticated cities, clothing, and material furnishings, thus contradicting contemporary notions of monstrous appearances, behaviour and dwellings. Through application of sartorial analysis as first developed by E. Jane Burns, ‘reading through clothes’ will help to explain how oriental finery and monstrosity together blur geographical boundaries in ways that ultimately help to shape Western courtly identity. In this discussion, pictorial imagery will play a crucial role. While only a relatively small amount of Herzog Ernst illustrations have survived, an examination of just a few images from one of the more extensive pictorial cycles reveals ways in which artists contributed to the conceptual merging of East and West, thereby subverting the East-West dichotomy apparently operational in medieval courtly romance.

____________________________________________

Eric Carlson
Department of English
University of South Carolina Aiken

Grendels, Glámrs, and Skrælings: A New World Ogre in its Infancy

Grændlendinga saga and Eirikssaga both describe the Scandinavian exploration of the New World in the early eleventh century. As with so many other examples of medieval travel literature, the Scandinavian explorers in these related texts come across examples of the supernatural and the monstrous in the course of their travels. Two of the most obvious are a ghostly visitation in chapter 7 of Grændlendinga saga and a uniped that appears in chapter 12 of Eirikssaga. However, both of these intersections with the monstrous are handled by the respective authors in a very matter-of-fact fashion, as if such events and creatures are relatively commonplace. What is intriguing, however, is how the authors of these sagas portray the Skrælings—the Native American tribes whom the Scandinavians meet along the North American coast. While the Skrælings are clearly “human” to both characters and saga authors alike, the authors portray them in a way that resonates with established traditions of ogres and trolls in Germanic literature. In essence, the authors of these sagas (and especially the author of Eirikssaga) create images of the North Americans that place them within an ogrish continuum and emphasizes the Skrælings’ “monstrous” qualities at the expense of their humanity. This is not to say, however, that the Skrælings are to be taken as ogres or trolls in the texts. Rather, we should read the portrayal of the Skrælings as the first step in an ongoing process of textual conversion in which the unfamiliar outsider becomes, via time and transmission, the inhuman monstrous other that will invariably threaten the fabric of society.

________________________________________________

Michelle Kustarz
Wayne State University

“On what maner he myght dyscrivyn hit aryght”: Tundale, Monsters and the Mappaemundi

Much criticism has been leveled at The Vision of Tundale’s apparent lack of narrative structure and continuity, particularly in its movement between the Passus and the Gaudia. The Passus detail increasingly horrid descriptions of the damned, culminating with Lucifer; the Gaudia begin with those undergoing mild punishments and then ascend to increasingly divine landscapes and visions. It had been recognized that this movement in Tundale is often seen as chaotic and unorganized by modern readers because it does not conform to the format of Dante, the culmination and most familiar of all purgatory visions. This paper posits that the movement of Tundale adheres to a different logic: that of the mappaemundi and various pseudo-travel writings such as the Wonders of the East and The Letter of Alexander to Aristotle.

The Vision of Tundale was particularly popular with its contemporary audience and much has been discussed of how the majority of the text’s surviving copies are found bound in manuscripts containing numerous popular romances, indicating that the text fulfilled an interest in grisly detail and adventure. Much less though has been discussed of Tundale’s relationship to travel narrative, monstrous description, and the logic of the mappaemundi. Taking Tundale’s encounter with Satan and his determination to “dyscrivyn hit aright” as a main site of investigation, this paper explores the affinities between Dante’s most elaborate predecessor and certain writings detailing the encounters one has when traveling East; contending that Tundale is not two separate visions and movements crammed together with mixed results, but rather a journey in close relationship with such travel texts.

________________________________________________

Medieval Ethnography
Dan Goldenberg
Tel Aviv University

It is widely accepted that medieval ethnography was re-invented during the 12th century with the works of Gerald of Wales, as argued by Robert Bartlett. In my paper I would rather like to suggest that the description of foreign people was a longue-dureé process which started in Ancient Greece and progressed all through the middle ages.

By suggesting some criteria of recognizing an ethnographic description, I would like to show that during the Early Middle Ages writers like Ammianus Marcelinus and Jordanes, and Adam of Bremen and Helmold of Bossau (in the 11th century) described invading peoples from the East and the Christianization of the Scandinavians and the Slavs. Some of these peoples were regarded as monsters, but still one can realize that although these descriptions were fragmentary, they represent an ongoing interest in the nature and habits of foreign people.

From the 12th century we have ethnographic monographs (written by Gerald of Wales, Giovanni Carpini and Wiliam of Rubruck). These works represent a rather new tendency towards eye-witness accounts and a greater attention to the author's own experience during his observation of foreign people. Even though these descriptions discuss the "monstrous races", they reveal some doubts regarding their very existence, as well as a tendency towards more realistic descriptions of other people.

________________________________________________

Christopher Maslanka
University of Wisconsin, Madison
Living Large and Leaving the Liminal: The Giant Saint and the Incarnation in the South English Legendary's Life of Saint Christopher

The Life of St. Christopher, as recorded in the earliest manuscript of The South English Legendary (MS Laud 108), interprets the excessive body of the giant as a metaphor for the paradox of the incarnation. Further, the SEL version of St. Christopher uses the embodied giant in a way consistent with Elizabeth Grosz’s theory of the body as a site where binaries break down. In the case of St. Christopher, the saint’s giant body challenges the divisions between human and God and between human and monster. Though the liminal position of the monster between binaries has been firmly established, this reading of St. Christopher’s legend describes a process by which that liminal body can travel across boundaries and be incorporated into the realm of either the divine or the human or both. Christopher’s initial contact with Christianity is categorized by references to Christ’s creation of Christopher’s giant body and to Christ’s physical sacrifice. When Christopher meets the Chri
st-child, the text focuses on the miraculous paradox of a child embodying limitless divine power and Christopher is left to question the humanity of the Christ-child, even as his own humanity has been questioned. In each instance the text connects Christopher’s excessive body with God’s excessive power, linking the two by metaphor and suggesting something of the monstrous in Christ. In Christopher’s subsequent trials the text juxtaposes Christopher’s Christologically appropriate responses to violence and overt sexuality with the expected narrative of violence associated with the giant’s body. The giant’s Christian behavior forces a re-interpretation of the narrative his body represents even as Christ’s monstrosity must be interpreted as evidence of divine power and grace. My analysis of St. Christopher suggests how a thirteenth century audience might have understood divine power by contemplating the paradox of the Christian giant.

________________________________________________
Queering Mandeville’s Female Monsters: Transformative, Transgender, Transsexual

Through his fictional travels, the eponymous Sir John Mandeville encounters not only priests, kings, and warriors from other cultures and religions, but also a wide selection of the monsters sampled in other variations of the medieval travel narrative. He lists the usual suspects, from the Cyclopes to the Sciapodes, monsters who are, by assumption, figured as male. However, Mandeville also points out four monsters specifically identified as female. While the male human(oid) monsters he mentions are usually monsters of lack, excess, or animal hybridity, the female monsters are defined most clearly by the ways in which they exceed or transgress the capacities and limits of the female body. The dragon woman, the dead woman who gives birth to a monstrous head, the Amazons, and the poison virgins all queer the notion of what it means not only to be a woman, but also to possess a woman’s body. Therefore, in this paper, I will examine the ways in which these women’s monstrous and transformative bodies might also be considered transgendered and transsexual. While identifying such bodies as monstrous circumscribes human behaviors and desires, it also exhibits the possibilities implicit in the incipient female form and the potential of the human body to not only function as an object of desire and prohibition, but also to become something new through the apparatus of monstrous and spectacular transformation.

Dr. Dana M. Oswald
Assistant Professor of English
University of Wisconsin-Parkside

________________________________________________

Karma de Gruy
Emory University
English Dept.

“The Angels Men Complain Of”: Monstrous Masculinity in La Conte du Graal

While traveling through a forest one day, Chretien de Troyes’ young hero, Perceval, encounters a group of knights for the first time, and is nearly overwhelmed by the sight of their shining, armored bodies. He recounts the experience to his horrified mother, who exclaims, “Tu as veu, si com je croi, / Les enges don la gent se plaignent, / Qui ocient quan qu’il ataignent” [You have seen, I believe, the angels men complain of, who kill whatever they come upon].

In examining Chretien de Troyes’ elusive and previously unexplored reference to “the angels men complain of,” this paper will argue that the romance diverges from the dominant chivalric narrative to imagine a masculinity susceptible to the ravages of affect. Critics such as Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Leo Braudy have suggested that the chivalric body in medieval romance is built from the outside in; in this articulation, the armor really does make the man. When Perceval sets out on his journey towards knighthood, it is this construction which drives him. Spurred on by a vision of the shining and beautiful knights he at first takes to be angels and filled with a burning desire to possess the armor and other accoutrements of knighthood, Perceval conceives of knightly identity as entirely composed of surfaces. He pursues a construction of chivalric masculinity in which the knight’s body is seamless, static, immune to affect, and impenetrable. But this ideal melding of body and armor, of identity and accoutrement, removes the knight from the category of what is recognizably human. The courtly violence of death-dealing knights renders them as beautiful, cold, and deadly as “the angels men complain of, who kill whatever they come upon.” In figuring the angel-knight as physically and morally monstrous, La Conte du Graal suggests a new masculine subject position emerging from the paradoxes of twelfth-century chivalric romance, and creates a heroic trajectory which dismantles the traditional hero/monster binary.
________________________________________________

LEEDS CFP 2010

2009-09-14T15:01:00.000-07:00

CFP: 2010 International Medieval Congress, Leeds
Title of Session(s): Exploring the Monstrous (I, II, ...)
Sponsor: Mearcstapa

This year's theme of Travel and Exploration seems tailor-made for work on monsters, many of which were believed to dwell in far-off lands, in 'the East,' or the far North or even, late in the period, in the 'New World.' We invite papers dealing with travel to monstrous lands and travel accounts describing interactions with monsters and monstrous peoples, as well as those dealing more abstractly with medieval explorations of the monstrous. We welcome papers in any discipline, dealing with any aspect of monstrosity in the Middle Ages. Depending on the submissions, we will propose between one and four full sessions to the selection committee at Leeds. Possibility exists for the collective publication of the papers, following the Congress.

Please send a paper title and abstract, along with you name, affiliation, mailing address and email address to Asa Simon Mittman (asmittman@csuchico.edu) by September 23, as we need to vote on these and submit as a unit to the IMC by October 1. Also please note if you will need any A/V equipment.

For more information, see the general CFP.

Two-Legged Sciopod?

2009-09-11T12:28:00.000-07:00

Julian Luxford (many thanks) sent these images to me, showing what he calls "the Dennington sciapod, from deepest Suffolk." It hails from the Parish Church of St. Mary, from a pew in the nave.

At a glance, they didn't raise my eyes, but a closer look suggests TWO feet, and two legs. The pose is Sciopodish, as is the size of of the foot/feet, but not the number. What IS this fellow? And what are those round objects between his arm and chest?

The images are quite large, so click on these for the full versions.

KZoo 2010 CFPs

2009-09-01T11:32:00.000-07:00

1. The Monstrous, the Marvelous, and the Miraculous

Much critical attention is currently being directed at the monstrous in the Middle Ages, but the category is, by its very nature, difficult to define. It bleeds at the edges into other fundamental categories, most notably the marvelous and the miraculous. On one end of this spectrum, we find horrifying, homophagic nightmares and, on the other, direct evidence for the power and mercy of God.

While these two extremes seem, at a glance, to have little in common, they both were marvelous, deserving and inspiring our wonder on account of lying outside of the realm of the everyday. Both were therefore viewed as signs of God's divinity and divine plan for the universe. In this session, we will interrogate the blurred boundaries between these richly ambiguous epistemological categories, not striving to artificially sharpen their boundaries but rather, seeking greater nuance in our understandings of all three.

Please send abstracts of 300 words, along with a completed Participant Information Form
(http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/congress/submissions/index.html#Paper),
to Melissa Ridley-Elmes at melissaelmes@carlbrook.org by 1 September 2009.

2. Unexpected Monsters: Close Encounters of the Other Kind

Typically, in medieval imagination, monsters appear in liminal spaces, in spaces outside of the civilized realm of the court. In literature they might appear in the forests and deserts, or in the mountain ranges, while on medieval maps they might appear in peripheral spaces, in the uncharted regions on the edges of the world. In such instances, they often represent all that is other, different, dangerous... the unknown.

But what happens when the monster is local? Internal? This panel proposes to explore instances of unexpected monstrosity or otherness within within medieval imaginings—instances of difference that occur at the level of the local and familiar, or within the self. Papers are invited that explore such interpretations of monstrosity within literature, art, and architecture (or in medieval culture at large).

Please send abstracts of 300 words, along with a completed Participant Information Form
(http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/congress/submissions/index.html#Paper),
to Renée Ward at rmward@ualberta.ca by 1 September 2009.

Submissions for KZoo 2010

2009-08-17T15:28:00.001-07:00

This post contains the numerous strong submissions for our sessions at Kalamazoo, 2010. We have an embarassment of riches, and will have to make some hard choices.
______________________________________
SESSION 1 SUBMISSIONS:

Between the Monstrous, the Marvelous and the Miraculous:
Boundary Blurring in BL Harley 3244

Diane Heath

This proposed paper discusses two full-page miniatures and a central tabular design on what were originally the opening folios in 13th C penitentiary, BL Harley 3244 (f.27r-28v). These miniatures exhibit a wealth of monsters; from the first image of a Dominican receiving a scroll from a levitating, bubble-headed Christ, via the central battle between the monstrous seven deadly sins with their insectoid vices against the armoured, anonymous mounted knight, to the final six-winged cherub defeating the seven-headed dragon of sin. How might we interpret these illustrations as blurring boundaries between the Godly and not-Godly, sacred and profane, monstrous and divine?

While these miniatures may be interpreted independently of each other, they may also be read as a sequence. This narration is key to understanding their intertwined, monstrous mark-stepping, describing a metamorphosis from human to angelic via destruction of sinfulness, shown as contorted and bestial monstrosity. By depicting these sins as hybrids with caricatured Jewish heads, we find further monstrosity in terms of modern perceptions of antisemitism. Conversely, the moralized knight and the tattooed, six-winged cherub initially seem to establish rather than ambiguate their categories. Yet their sacred mission to overcome temptation is problematized by the secularity of the knight, whose weapons and accoutrements are then labelled as spiritual metaphors e.g. ‘the lance of perseverance’. Such monstrous martial imagery infuses this possibly early septenary for penitential meditation, indicating initiation anxieties over masculine power and celibacy.

Violent metamorphosis from sinful subhuman to beyond human is as relevant to the modern as it was to the medieval reader. Medieval monsters are often viewed as liminal and haunting but these spring centre-page as terrifying aspects of human failings and yearnings. Examining the interweaving of the monstrous, marvelous and miraculous Other in BL Harley 3244 allows a nuanced interpretation of its richly symbolic, boundary-blurring hermeneutics.

______________________________________
Brian McFadden
English Department
Texas Tech University

Miraculum, Mirabilis, Wundor, Tacen:
How Did the Anglo-Saxons Categorize Miracles and Marvels?

In this paper I will argue that the lexical line between marvels and miracles in early Christian Latin literature was porous, but Anglo-Saxon writers used multiple words to indicate shades of meaning rather than one potentially ambiguous word when discussing miracles and marvels. In early Christian Latin texts, mirabilia (wonders) could be used of both naturally- and supernaturally-driven phenomena, and while miracula were frequently acts of God, there are many instances where Latin writers called natural wonders miracula as well. However, there appears to have been a conceptual if not lexical distinction between natural and supernatural wonders; miracles are signs of divine power, indicators of divine will, or divine recognition of human virtue, and terms such as vis, virtus, index, potestas, or signum (strength, virtue, pointer, power, sign) were used to indicate the supernatural origin of an event, and they suggest a significance for the unusual event which must be derived from the context in which it occurs. If God is the author of natural law, however, all creation is potentially significant, even if the significance is not apparent; monstra, prodigia, portenta (monsters, prodigies, portents), and similar terms for wonders derive from verbs that imply extraordinary significance (monstrare, prodigere, portendere). However, without a specific context for interpreting them, the perceiver is left with a sense of anxiety over the encounter rather than a sense of the divine will. Anglo-Saxon writers, when discussing natural wonders, tend to use wundor or the verb wundrian on their own, but for miracles tend to use tacen or the verb tacnian in conjunction with wundor to indicate the awe induced by the event or being but to contain the anxiety in the context of divine action. I will conclude with a brief comparison of Bede and the Alfredian translator of the Historia Ecclesiastica with the Latin and Old English versions of Alexander's Letter to Aristotle to show how Anglo-Saxon translators grapple with the desire to produce intellectual categories for marvels and miracles despite the limits with which their language presents them.

______________________________________

The ‘Sign of Jonah’ and a Ketos Tail Point to the ‘Son of David’ Psalm, Ps. 72

Linda Møskeland Fuchs
Chesterton House, Ithaca, NY

In Matthew 12, Jesus heals a man blind, mute and demon-possessed, provoking the response, ‘Could this be the Son of David?’ Pharisees and scholars request a miraculous sign but Jesus says no sign will be given except the Sign of Jonah: As Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the sea creature, the Son of Man will be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth; also, men of Nineveh and the Queen of the South will testify for him in the Day of Judgment.

In the Book of Jonah, God prepares a ‘Great Fish’ (Hebrew dag gadol; Greek κήτος) to seize Jonah. Jonah’s ketos becomes both devourer and vehicle of safe passage. This creature is visualized in third-century Rome as a writhing sea-monster with serpentine body and boar-like head. A Christian twist on the Roman sea-monster appears on the Vatican 31448 ‘Jonah’ sarcophagus: The tail of the ketos becomes a crescent moon pointing to an inhabited sun. Unlike Sol, the man in the sun wears a crown atop his head. A coronation hymn for Solomon, Psalm 72, includes qualities no
human son of David could have: ‘May he endure as long as the sun; as long as the moon through all generations.’ Also, ‘Kings of Tarshish and of distant shores will bring tribute to him; royalty of Sheba and Seba will present him gifts.’ Sun and moon evoke temporal dominion, while Tarshish and Sheba (limits of the trading world) suggest spatial dominion. Geographic motifs parallel to the Jonah story in Psalm 72 (Tarshish) and Matthew12 (Nineveh) are both linked to the Queen of Sheba (‘royalty of Sheba’ / ‘Queen of the South’). In Matthew, this linkage hints of Psalm 72, answering ‘yes’ to the question ‘Could this be the Son of David?’

______________________________________
SESSION 2 SUBMISSIONS:

Ilan Mitchell-Smith
Monster Knights: Chivalric Identity and Monstrosity in Late-Medieval Chivalric Romance

In the romance Sir Gowther, the eponymous protagonist exhibits traditional traits of medieval monstrosity from birth, and the people of his father’s court and lands suffer greatly for it. Academic treatments of this narrative (Such as E.M. Bradstock’s or more recently Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s) have seen Gowther’s transgression into monstrosity as a polar opposite to heroism or a more viable chivalric identity. This paper nuances these earlier arguments, however, by suggesting that some of the markers of Gowther’s monstrosity are not eradicated as much as they are channeled. Monstrosity in this romance, I argue, is not corrected or rejected, but instead is incorporated and directed according to strict guidelines as well as national and religious concerns (namely against an encroaching Sultan and his army). Certain other romances, such as Libeaus Desconus and Sir Launfal treat monstrous behavior similar ways, in that they criticize monstrous behavior except when performed according to specific guidelines and strictures.

In this paper, I use the example of Sir Gowther to consider this role of monstrosity and to complicate the argument put forward by Michael Camille (in Image on the Edge) that late-medieval monstrosity is often synonymous with peripheral spaces of the non-Christian other. This paper then examines range of other mid- to late-fourteenth century Middle English chivalric romances to explore how monstrous sexual and violent behavior becomes both inherent to, and rejected by, contemporary perceptions of chivalric identity. The result in these romances is a kind of double bind, in which the protagonist is encouraged towards the very behaviors that threaten to dismantle the identity that he is trying to construct. The paper finally examines how certain chivalric narratives of the mid- to late-fourteenth century attempt to solve this double bind by projecting monstrous excess onto clerks and rustics while imagining chivalric identity as an Aristotelian balance that both accepts and rejects opposing kinds of excess.

______________________________________

Jamie Friedman
Kalamazoo 2010

Monster Flesh
This paper will examine the fourteenth century romance, The King of Tars, as a narrative particularly interested in exploring the intersections of self and Other in the intimate spaces of womb, bedroom, and altar. The story recounts the marriage between a Christian maiden and a Muslim sultan that effects an illicit commingling, across racial and religious boundaries, materialized in the birth of a child described as a featureless round of flesh. Elsewhere pictured as an unnatural man/animal or black/white mélange, his is the monstrous body of transgressed limits, boundaries breached, that the story’s goal is to naturalize. I would like to pay attention to this strange flesh ball child as a provocative instance of the materialization of the unexpected Other within. Far from being marginalized, the trajectory of this formless flesh occupies the center of the narrative, as it circulates through the maiden’s body, through the center of the Muslim court, through bedroom and temple, and on into its Christianized future.
This reading proposes to tease out the hermeneutic, corporeal, and identitarian potentialities mobilized in the temporary incarnation of this monstrous flesh. I maintain that the materialization of the flesh child disrupts the essentiality and stability of all racial-religious identities in the narrative – white as well as black, Christian as well as Muslim – providing the moment for the potential construction of either Christian or Saracen, male or female, human or animal selves. Attending to the strange, mobile flesh of the lump child as it circulates through the inner spaces of the narrative ultimately illustrates the identitarian productivity in the touch of monstrous flesh. While that flesh retains, however briefly, its elasticity and illegibility, it calls into question the naturalness of the identities it touches and opens a tantalizing space of corporeal and identitarian permeability and plenitude.

______________________________________

R. Scott Bevill
English Department - MARCO
University of Tennessee – Knoxville

ABSTRACT: But He's OUR Monster! The Monstrous Hero in Epic and Saga.
Though monstrous entities typically play the antagonistic role of 'other' in medieval literature, on occasion, the most monstrous of characters may indeed be the hero of a work. His savagery, supernatural strength or abilities, and often semi-divine origins betray his own otherness. While he works for the tribe or kingdom, defending her from internal and external threats, this awe and fear- inspiring hero is revered and praised for his heroic feats. But in some cases, his otherness is too extreme for polite society.

Grettir seems to be the likeliest candidate for this character type. His otherness is obvious from the beginning, but the townsfolk are willing to tolerate his more frightening aspects as long as he rids them of the draugr that plagues their village. Unfortunately, Grettir suffers a curse during the cleansing of the hall and soon becomes as reviled as the monsters he fights. CuChulainn's battle rage turns him into an indescribable terror, and he is unpredictably dangerous to both friend and foe during the fury of his torque. Beowulf is just as comfortable ripping off appendages of human foes as he is Grendel, but that is to be expected from a hero whose leige-lord is featured within the Liber Monstrorum. And Bendeigfran of the Mabinogion is so ridiculously huge that the Irish mistake him for a mountain swimming across the sea from Wales.

In this paper, I would like to explore how these ostensible heroes are either able to integrate and
thrive in their societies, or become anathema to the very people they initially protected.
______________________________________
Marla Pagan-Mattos
University of Pennsylvania

"Mary as M/Other: Motherhood and Alterity in the Cantigas de Santa María of Alfonso X"

Much of scholarly production on the medieval representation of the monstruos has identified it as a locus of alterity. The monster has been rightly perceived as a sign of otherness, a so-called “third term” against which cultural categories are constituted. Contrastingly, the construction of female as other and its relation to the cult of the Virgin Mary has been regarded mostly in terms of didactic and exemplary normativization of medieval women. However, there are aspects of the figure of Mary that are excessive, undomesticable, unfixed, and somewhat monstruos. Her position as mediator between heaven and earth, interceding for her devotees in repairing their transgressions in front of Christ, places her almost literally as a third term, analogous to that of the monsters’. That placement is based on a single enigmatic event in her life: her giving birth to the incarnate God. Thus, her becoming a mother constitutes her as an other in relation to both the earthly and the divine. The Cantigas de Santa María of Alfonso X --and its intriguing combination of text, image, and song-- in 13th-century Iberia offers several instances where Mary is portrayed as (m)other. The portrayal of motherhood in most of the miracles presents Mary as interceding in highly problematic relations between a mother and her offspring, or a mother and her pregnancy, or where the earthly mothers’ responsibilities cannot be fulfilled. In most of these miracles, Mary is presented as a subtitute mother, one that takes the place of the earthly mother and fulfills her role. She becomes literally an “other’s” mother, although she is another’s mother. In this paper I will analyze the representation of Mary’s motherhood in Cantiga 46, where she is portrayed providing nourishment to another “other,” a converted Moor.
______________________________________

Anne Derbes, Hood College
and
Amy Neff, University of Tennessee

Monstrous Blood
Satan crystallizes all that is deemed evil. In medieval art, the representation of Lucifer consistently characterizes him as the epitome of sin and monstrosity. In late thirteenth-century Italy, however, Satan’s persona undergoes significant change. Without relinquishing traditional signs of vice, Satan’s image also becomes perversely female and Jewish. One graphic sign of perversity that has not been previously noted is the depiction of Satan’s blood. Our focus is on Italian depictions of the Last Judgment, in which Satan and his minions bleed, sometimes while seemingly “giving birth” to victims, sometimes hemorrhaging from their ears, mouth, and anus. While this demonic shedding of blood is a clear subversion of Christ’s wounding, it also reflects Christian preoccupation with the eucharist and the anti-Jewish propaganda that came in its wake.
Monstrous blood is especially apparent as Satan gives birth. While Christ gives spiritual birth, the feminized body of Satan gives birth in damnation. Satan’s bleeding is not inflicted by others but comes from his own deviant physiology, exposing a shameful female body that inverts gender and the economy of salvation. We contend that stereotyped denigration of women and Jews coalesce in the image of the devil bleeding. Demonic blood issuing from the groin area reflects a virulent myth circulating in late medieval Italy: that Jewish men menstruated, their punishment for spilling the blood of Christ. This type of anti-Jewish imagery goes back at least to the late 11th century but intensified in the thirteenth with the preaching of mendicant friars. Two monuments from northeast Italy, c. 1300, vividly illustrate these concepts. The Supplicationes variae (Florence, Biblioteca Laurenziana, Plut. 25.3), dated 1293, includes perhaps the earliest depiction of Satan giving birth; the characterization of evil as perversely gendered and Jewish becomes even stronger in the Arena Chapel, Padua, painted by Giotto, 1303-1305.
______________________________________

Rosalyn Saunders

Monstrous and Malicious Women: Discovering the Damnable Practises of Three Notorious Witches, Joan, Margaret and Phillip Flower

In Scotland and England during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a new form of witchcraft developed that defined the witch as increasingly malevolent and diabolical. To date, most analysis of this situation has focused on the deteriorating position of women in contemporary society and their subsequent function as scapegoats for a variety of social ills. These explanations, however, do not entirely account for the creation of the monstrous witch and the particular traits inherent in her deeply unsettling character.

This paper, therefore, will focus on the characterisation of Joan Flower and her daughters in the pamphlet Witchcrafts, Strange and Wonderfull (1635), and suggest that the terrifying natures and behaviours of these three witches were informed and shaped by a continuum of monstrosity that can be traced back to an earlier monster tradition.
Although the diabolical witch had not been seen before the fourteenth century in Europe, early modern demonological writers did not create a wholly new figure; rather, they turned to an earlier tradition that equated those who violated cultural ideologies with moral inferiority, physiognomic deformities and monstrous behaviour. These general principles were overlaid onto women in order to transform them into suitably diabolical witches, a manoeuvre that upholds the importance of gender considerations in witchcraft analysis, but in a way that has been previously overlooked.

Despite their moral and physiognomic deformities, however, Joan, Margaret and Phillip were able to exist within the community as fully functioning members. Their ability to pass as ‘normals’ enabled them to not only infiltrate the community, but also the bodies of their victims: they quite literally get under the skin of their victim in order to cause harm. The pamphlet’s author appropriates elements from the monster tradition and places these uncontrolled, sexually rapacious, vindictive, and murderous witches amidst the community to affect a horrifying transition from ‘out there’ (where monsters are supposed to stay) to ‘right here’ (within the community space). They blur the boundaries between the ‘known’ and the ‘unknown’, and the reaction of society is extreme and violent because these ‘monsters’ are not in the peripheral, but local and, therefore, utterly terrifying.

______________________________________

Kira Robison
University of Minnesota

The Creature Within: Defining the Fiend in Medieval Anatomy

Although medieval monsters were often thought of as mythical and imaginary beasts, they could also be both human and real. This paper will explore the ways that physicians in the late fifteenth century defined monstrosity in a medical sense—as both a physical abnormality and a personality disorder using physiognomic and anatomical manuscripts. Physiognomies were texts that determined personality through particular physical structures, like the face. During the later Middle Ages, physiognomies began to appear as part of anatomical texts, a practice concerned with mapping the “normality” of the physical body, as understood through dissection of the cadaver.
The coupling of these two types of text helped the physician identify monstrousness through investigation of the physical body. They would then use the “normality” of the body, as identified in the anatomical texts, to point out “abnormal” characteristics in the person, such as wickedness, fearfulness, or insanity. Alternatively, perfectly normal-looking humans would be labeled as monsters if it was discovered upon dissection that they bore anatomical abnormalities within them. Thus, the physical body was the bearer of the monster’s mark, either as an external manifestation of an evil personality or an internal deformity.

______________________________________

Absent Monsters or Invisible Others: Iberian Medieval Monsters
Ana Grinberg
Department of Literature, University of California, San Diego

During the Middle Ages and from a geographical perspective, the Iberian Peninsula was the limit to the civilized world, as happens in Dante’s Inferno Canto 26, the Hereford Map, Chaucer’s Man of Law’s Tale, among others. Evidently Iberia is the Southern borderline, the periphery, the outskirts around an ideological and geographical center; and borderlines are the place where we face the monster, the other. As Michael Uebel reminds us, the borderlines are “gaps or middle places symbolizing exchange and encounter.” (Michael Uebel, “Unthinking the Monster: Twelfth-Century Responses to Saracen Alterity.” Monster Theory: Reading Culture. Ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1996, 265.) Iberia indeed is a location where hybrid identities flourish, where other races and peoples inhabit: it is what Mary Louise Pratt calls a contact zone, a place of meeting, clashing, and grappling of disparate and asymmetrical cultures. (Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes. London: Routledge, 1992.)
Nevertheless, few medieval narratives have monsters within this location. An example is found in the Sultan of Babylon, where the Sultan Laban has three Saracen giants fighting on his side and his “chief cité” Egremoure is located in Iberian soil (717-719). (“Sultan of Babylon.” Three Middle English Charlemagne Romances: “The Sultan of Babylon,” “The Siege of Milan, and “The Tale of Ralph the Collier.” Ed. Alan Lupack. Kalamazoo, Mich.: Medieval Institute Publications, Western Michigan University, for TEAMS, 1990.) In Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae there is “a giant of monstrous size… emerged from certain regions in Spain” (237) living in Mont Saint Michel. (Geoffrey of Monmouth. The History of the Kings of Britain. Ed. Lewis G. M. Thorpe. London: Penguin Books, 1980.) But these two examples were written from without what we nowadays call Spain. Apparently, medieval Christian Iberians were not interested in depicting monsters in their own territory. Besides the monstrous “serrana” in Juan Ruiz’s Libro de Buen Amor and Rulan’s encounter against giant Ferragudo in the 12th-century Galician translation of the Pseudo Turpin, there appears no other monster. In this paper, I will explore possible explanations to this absence. Where are the local literary monsters? I posit that the convivencia of Christians, Muslims, and Jews in Iberia gave place to a hybrid culture, itself monstrous when seen from far. If monsters are the result of a perceived difference, in the case of Iberia the (religious) other is seen as an “intimate stranger” who is too near to become monstrous.

______________________________________

Bodies on the Border: Human Identity and the Lump-Child in King of Tars

Stephanie Norris – The University of Iowa

This paper seizes upon a horrifying detail in The King of Tars (14thc) that distinguishes that Auchinleck romance from its analogues: the physical nature of the child born to a Christian princess wedded to a Saracen sultan. While other versions of the tale describe a fully formed child whose skin is hirsute, oddly half-hairy and half-smooth, or piebald, the King of Tars represents the progeny of this taboo interfaith marriage as a lump of flesh lacking eyes, nose, mouth and limbs. The question of how to read the presence of the lump-child has recently been engaged by Siobhan Calkin, who claims it embodies “failed or impossible” religious categorization in response to a taboo interfaith marriage and, Jane Gilbert, who argues that it allows the poet to define maternity, paternity and gender roles in the King of Tars. I propose that the presence of the lump child destabilizes traditional medieval human/animal binaries in that its physical deformity insinuates a more far-reaching question: What does it mean to be human? I invoke Giorgio Agamben’s theoretical paradigm of the anthropological machine to enrich my reading of the lump-child as a threatening identity that is neither human nor animal. For Agamben, when the human ceases to be produced and sustained by the inhuman a being “for which we have no name” emerges in that space. I assert that the lump-child triangulates the human/animal binary because it lies outside the boundaries of any category as a completely separate and unidentifiable entity. As a result of this destabilization, traditionally animalized Saracen figures seem to assume a more humanized existence. Nevertheless, the anthropological machine attempts to resume it oppressive production of Christian humanity upon the lump’s Christian baptism (and its reception of a perfect and white human form) but, in the space between the child’s birth and its conversion, this romance offers us a powerful destabilization of notions of Christianity and its Others.

______________________________________

Monstrous Meres and Mirrors in Anglo-Saxon Literature
Brianna K. MacLean

My paper asks how we might contextualise the physical and imaginary geography of monsters in Anglo-Saxon literature. By attempting to locate the position of monsters in the Anglo-Saxon consciousness, we can better understand heroic society by examining what they deemed culturally antithetical, how they understood figures and roles of the Other, and how they translated these understandings into narrative.

One of the most iconic monsters in Anglo-Saxon literature is Beowulf’s Grendel, who is monstrous in his corruption and manipulation of the human form. Beowulf and Grendel are polar opposites who coexist in a paradigm symbiotically; therefore, the existence of one is predicated on the existence of the other. Grendel’s applicability to humanity is more threatening to the Anglo-Saxons than the dragon’s clear separation from humanity since Grendel reflects heroic society and illustrates the human potential for monstrosity. The dragon, as an archetypal monster, cannot reflect heroic society because its form and culture are too disparate from humanity. Like Beowulf, the Liber monstrorum and the Wonders of the East also feature monstrous corruptions of humanity, rather than strictly archetypal monsters. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen argues that the monstrous body is pure culture, a projection of society that exists only to be read. In this light, monsters are a byproduct of culture, necessary to define what it means to be human by revealing meaning, rather than producing it. Thus, monsters are not at the edges of the map, as they were often depicted, but rather at the core of heroic society, functioning as a catalyst for heroic deeds and a reflection of society itself. This presents a disparity between the physical geography of monsters, as illustrated in maps and literature, and the imaginary or cultural spaces that they occupy in the Anglo-Saxon consciousness.

______________________________________

Unexpected Monsters in an Unexpected Place: Representing the Marginal in a Portuguese Medieval Tomb
Marisa COSTA
Scientific researcher (History of Science and Technology Center – University of Lisbon)
Ph.D. Student in Medieval History (University of Lisbon)

ABSTRACT:
The Braga cathedral, in Portugal, owns in its treasure a tomb from the fifteenth century which commemorates Prince Afonso (1390-1400), first-born son of King João I and heir to the Portuguese throne. Although this monument is little known, it is of exceptional quality and European importance, since it combines a series of unique features, totally unprecedented in Portuguese art.
The tomb comprises a gilt, cast copper-alloy effigy of the prince lying on a draped cloth. His face is silvered as is the inside of his tunic’s pleats. The tomb chest supporting the effigy has a wooden core entirely covered with gilded copper friezes and plates richly embossed with vegetal elements, like trees with thick trunks and long branches, as well as zoomorphic elements, like birds, monkeys, hounds, stags, lions, and mythical creatures.
Yet, in this visual form, such medieval natural world is shared by a prolific variety of unexpected beasts. In fact, the plates also show a world inhabited by peculiar hybrids, drolleries and grotesques, wild men and other ‘homines monstruosis’. They display the characteristic marginal world that medieval imagination created and gathered in artistic repertoires rooted in literary sources like fables, travelogues and bestiaries, as in encyclopedias, Fathers of the Church’ texts, the Bible, and, ultimately, classical writings.
Similar representations of otherness and monstrosity within medieval culture normally appear in liminal spaces, like manuscripts margins and borders, ceiling bosses or misericords, in order to entertain viewers, suggest moral interpretations or symbolize the edges of civilization. In this instance, however, unexpected monsters emerge in a surprising, unexpected place as it is the set of tomb chest plates. The aim of this paper is therefore to examine the purposes of such animal imagery, assessing its iconography, its stylistic features and its artistic inspiration.
______________________________________

The Onocentaurus and the Cardinal, or: Distinguised Monsters in 16th-century Venice
Edina Eszenyi, PhD student
University of Kent School of History

The career of the onocentaurus, a.k.a. ass-centaur, has been long and dubious since its appearance in Greek mythology. Certain versions of the Physiologus, as well as Icelandic and early English Bestiaries still made mention of him, yet later he gradually gave place to more popular colleagues merging man and animal, like the centaur or the siren. The appearance of the monster has been even more sporadic in Early Modern times, an example of which is his inclusion in the Aureum rosarium theologiae of the Hungarian Pelbertus de Themeswar.

The presentation deals with the figure of the onocentaurus in the late-sixteenth century angel and demon lexicon of Vincenzo Cicogna, a supposed family member of the contemporary Doge of Venice. The lexicon is entitled Angelorvm et daemonvm nomina et attribvta… (Los Angeles, Getty Research Institute MS 86-A866). It interprets 223 particular and metaphorical references to angels and demons, and ends with a treatise on the parallel of the angelic and ecclesiastical hierarchies, which compares cardinal bishops to fallen angels. Meanwhile, the piece was dedicated right to a cardinal bishop, namely Giulio Antonio Santori, the single most influential member of ecclesiastical circles of his time. As Prefect of the Supreme Sacred Congregation of the Roman and Universal Inquisition he participated in such heresy processes as those against Giordano Bruno, was personal consultant of seven popes, and himself a candidate for papacy in 1592.

While medieval authors compared the onocentaurus to religious deviants, he is a metaphor for demons in Cicogna’s lexicon. The presentation is to explore this monster’s transformation and re-contextualization through eras and cultures til his arrival in realms of the Inquisition.

KZoo Submissions

2008-09-30T20:49:00.001-07:00

Unnatural Births: Satan's insceafte in "Solomon and Saturn II"
Karma de Gruy
Emory University
kdegruy@emory.edu

The importance of apocryphal influences on the Anglo Saxon literary tradition has long been noted by scholars, from Oliver Emerson’s 1906 treatment of legends of Cain through Kathryn Powell and D.G. Scragg’s 2003 Apocryphal Texts and Traditions in Anglo-Saxon England. While, as Peter Dendle demonstrates in Satan Unbound, the devil serves various and sometimes contradictory roles in the Anglo Saxon corpus, in at least one case he is said to plan a curious sort of unnatural propagation. In “Solomon and Saturn II,” Satan says “ðæt he mid his gesiðum wolde / hiðan eall heofona rice and him ðonne on healfum sittan, / tydran him mid ðy teoðan dæle, oððæt he his tornes ne cuðe / ende ðurh insceafte” [that with his companions he wished to completely ravage the kingdom of the heavens and to occupy half himself, and procreate himself with the tenth part, until through this internal propagation he could give his anger an end] (444-447). Robert Menner has suggested that the hapax legomenon insceafte be glossed as an “internal generation,” i.e., from within the ranks of the fallen angels. However, I will argue that insceafte, a specific means of generation related to the verb form tydrian in line 446, should be examined in light of the latter’s various associations in the Anglo Saxon corpus.

These associations deal with literal, corporeal progeny and breeding, but also moral weakness, barrenness, and destruction; they hint at monstrous becomings and questions of the role of angels and their giant and monstrous offspring in the origins of humanity after Satan’s fall. Taking these connotations as a starting point, I hope to reexamine the “Solomon and Saturn” poet’s use of the word insceafte in order to trace a genealogy of association and evolution which results in this most striking and mysterious of descriptions of unnatural propagation. A philological and comparative examination of this hapax legomenon may lead us to a clearer understanding of how the spiritual and corporeal nature of some of the demons and monsters we encounter elsewhere in the poetic corpus was understood. As Oliver Emerson’s contribution to the discussion on the apocryphal tradition elucidates, there existed medieval connections between not only Cain and the devil, but Cain and the giants who were the offspring of the ‘sons of God’ in Genesis 6.1-4. The mingling of fallen angel, human, and monster in humanity’s dim past loomed large in the Anglo Saxon imagination. Just as, in Beowulf, the gigantas kin of Cain stand as shadowy figures at the beginnings of human life in the world, so too do fallen angels, who are associated with ancient giants in the apocryphal tradition where the human, the demonic, and the monstrous were not always so clearly delineated.

____________________________

Marcus Hensel
Nat he þara goda: Weapons and the Grendelkin’s Status as Monsters

(ABSTRACT) One of the problems with the debate over the nature of the Grendelkin is that we have been trying to apply an ontological definition to them when a functional definition would be more instructive. If we want to learn about and from the poem, we should be less concerned with whether the Grendelkin are trolls, zombies, or exiles and more concerned with what they can tell us about the cultural moment in which they were created.
To extend this line of thinking, this paper, which is part of a larger research project, examines how the poet(s) exaggerated the difference of the Grendelkin from humans by casting them as monsters via the manipulation of cultural markers. One of the most important processes for monsterizing the Grendelkin was to show their (mis)use of material goods, which helped delineate and reinforce the differences between the categories of “human” and “monster” for the poet(s) and the audience. By this criterion, the Grendelkin make the perfect antithesis to human cultural practices. In a world where weapons have lineages arguably as important as those of the warriors who wield them, both are inimical to human weapons and neither makes use of the enta geweorc in their own hall.
Their stance is no accident: it helps create one part of a pastiche representing what the Anglo-Saxon poet thought a monster would be. Through the exaggeration of cultural markers like weapons, we can see the Beowulf-poet(s) mining important cultural values for concepts with which to create the Grendelkin. Not only the end result of the monsters in the poem, but also the process of their creation can tell us much more about the fear, mores, and tensions of the cultural moment that spawned Beowulf than can the argument as to what they “really” were.

____________________________
Carola Dwyer
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Dept. of Comparative Literature, Medieval Studies

Kissed by a monster: Blonde Esmerée and Lady Synadowne as grotesque women of power

In Renaut’s de Bâgé 12th-century Old French romance Li Biaus Descouneüs, the character Blonde Esmerée appears as a hybrid woman who changes into a serpent-like body after having been cursed by a suitor whom she refused to marry. Also quite similarly misshapen, Lady Synadowne, the enchanted queen Thomas Chestre’s shape-shifts, and appears as a monstrous vuivre in the Middle English version Lybeaus Desconus of the Old French tale.

Although their serpentine shape can be traced back to a Celtic water fairy, the contradiction between courtly lady and serpent is a strong statement that can be interpreted beyond the description of otherworldliness or the world of enchantment. Finding a true other in bodies that are neither human nor beast, Blonde Esmerée and her later counterpart demonstrate vivid textual interaction and bear an ugliness that does not need to be remedied by a knight’s voluntary commitment to an ugly woman, as has been seen in the loathly lady motif.

In my dissertation, which is a comparative study across roughly two hundred years and four texts (besides the two mentioned earlier I include also the Old French Melusine and its German cognate), I am investigating female grotesque forms within the framework of the courtly romance genre and its continuations. I have developed my own definition of the grotesque as a critical framework that combines modern theory with medieval ideas and culture. In modern scholarship, the grotesque is understood as an artistic space in which human society is turned on its head by the depiction of an outlandish creature or event with clearly discernable aspects relating to daily life, which are, however, portrayed in some excessive form. For a medieval text, the rules are different insofar as that the literature of this time period is riddled with extraordinary creatures, places, and events, and one has to distinguish between a literary commonplace and an uncommon grotesque occurrence. In all four texts examined in my dissertation, the grotesque woman is a noblewoman whose character traits, behavior, and status conform to courtly culture, but who appears in an ugly and monstrous body that features at least one audaciously feminine feature desired by medieval knights. In each case of the grotesque woman, the woman’s role is pivotal for the knight’s development, but at the same time the man is overwhelmed and mocked; this double effect questions cultural norms on various levels, and exposes one aspect of gender relations in medieval culture: namely, the correlation between appearance and power. When the woman loses her human form, she gains power.

For your 2009-Kalamazoo session on “Monstrous Production and Reproduction,” I would like to suggest a comparative study of the two noblewomen, Blonde Esmerée and Lady Synadowne. I will discuss the consequences of female monsters in late medieval narrative with respect to cultural reproduction and genre development from classical Arthurian romance from the early 13th century to English popular romance in the later 14th century.

KZoo Roundtable Participants

2008-09-22T10:07:00.000-07:00

So far:

Mary Kate Hurley
Karma deGruy
Stuart Kane
Jeff Massey
Derek Newman-Stille
Asa Mittman

and, of course, JJC

Leeds

2008-09-21T19:59:00.000-07:00

As proposed to the Selection Committee:

Session 1: Unorthodox Beings I: We Are Our Monstrous Others

Tina Boyer
"nun weiz ich nit warumb ich her solte:" Observations on the role of giants in Orendel

The following paper is an attempt to illuminate characters, such as the giants Mentwin, Liberian, and Pelian and give their behavior an additional meaning within the Middle High German epic Orendel. The author of Orendel intended to describe the fate of Christ's coat. The hero, or catalyst in this epic, functions as the instrument to bring the coat to its intended resting place, but in doing so, defeats the forces of unbelievers, who threaten the holiest City in Christendom. The monsters that Orendel encounters function on two levels. Their otherness is supernatural, but foremost they are heathen and represent in their largeness and fierceness heathendom itself.

The fascination with the Orient is a reflection of the fascination with the "other". The self-identity of European crusaders is based on their being different from their non-European opponents; this gives them a sense of unity, of belonging to a category that is understood, an ordered binary existence that differentiates Good from Evil. The superiority of the crusader's identity effectively "others" his heathen enemy, he designates the space that is familiar by categorizing the space outside and the liminal beings that inhabit it.

In an epic such as Orendel the threat to the ordered courtly existence are heathens, who descend upon Jerusalem, in which Queen Bride and Orendel represent the order ordained by God and upheld by courtly society. In order to emphasize the threat of the "Other" at the gates of ordered space, the successive armies are led by giants, who symbolize in their prowess the essence of the heathen world. The giant is, at the same time, the monster from the Beyond and through his body, as symbol, we can see the monstrous differences in religion and cultures. His body has become the battleground upon which Christian ideology builds its fantasies of the Oriental world.

Michael Elliot
University of Toronto, Canada

My paper is titled 'Vocabulary and the Minds of the Monsters in "Beowulf"'. I look at the 'Beowulf' poet's characterisation of Grendel, Grendel's' mother, and the Dragon through the words - usually the verbs and adjectives - which describe their thoughts, states of mind, intentions, etc. Investigations into the nature of the monsters in 'Beowulf' has traditionally centered around nominal epithets, e.g. 'thyrs', 'feond', 'theodscatha', 'merewif', 'hellerune', and 'draca'. This line of study leads to a simplistic understanding of the monsters in that it bypasses the carefully-constructed psychological interiority of the monsters, particularly that of Grendel. Indeed, that critics of the poem perennially return to the issue of Grendel's 'intermittent humanity', of his 'human-ness' , is largely the result of the extent to which the poet depicts these monsters from the inside out, fashioning their personae by characterising them psychologically rather than physically. The noted lack of physical descriptions of the monsters in the poem goes hand-in-hand with the poet's strategy, as does their inability - or refusal - to communicate through speech. I propose that it is the poet's vivid depiction of the minds and psychologies of these monsters that make them such horrifically compelling, yet uncomfortably human-like, antagonists. To facilitate this line of study I have composed a complete list of the words in 'Beowulf' used to describe the minds of the three principal monsters.

Derek Newman-Stille
Trent Univeristy
Monstrosity and Disability in the Middle Ages

The medieval audience often portrayed disability as monstrous. People
with physical disabilities were naturally portrayed as 'other' since
they embodied difference in their own bodies and in their interactions
with the able-bodied majority. They were amalgamated with the symbolic
monstrous because, like monsters, they embody and represent difference.
They challenge the concept of normalcy and defy normal category
concepts, which causes them to be stigmatised and associated with
monstrosity. They provide a challenge of how to fit them into
established social categories. In Medieval narratives, monstrosity and
disability were examined in relation to morality, and both were often
inflicted and removed by religious authorities.

Session 2. Unorthodox Beings II: Inhabiting Limnal Moments and Spaces

Justin T. Noetzel
Department of English, Saint Louis University
"The door immediately gave way": Heroes, Monsters, and the "Contested Doorway" in Beowulf and Medieval Northern Literature

The twentieth century featured lively scholarly debate by medievalists on the similarities between Beowulf and other literature of the medieval northern world, including the Norse "Hrolfs Saga Kraki" and the Icelandic "Grettis Saga." My paper enters this field of research and focuses on the central dichotomy of the hero and the monster in Beowulf. The central and mythic heart of stories like Beowulf and "Grettis Saga" is the human need to defend itself against the harsh natural world. The monsters in these stories represent chaos and the unorthodox wild lashing out at its human occupants, and man must find a hero in order to defeat nature and ensure his survival. Such a notion has been suggested by recent scholars, but I will add new insight with a detailed examination of each element of the hero-monster fight, and I will also account for characters and stories that have not yet received enough scholarly attention, such as the Icelandic "Gull-Thoris Saga." This paper's most important innovation in this fertile area of scholarship is an intense focus on the role of the doorway and threshold in the hero-monster dichotomy. Doors and buildings are often assaulted and destroyed in Anglo-Saxon and Norse literature, and this violence occurs because the heroes want to fight inside while the monsters want to fight outside or flee the battle entirely. Although each combatant has the greater advantage in their respective realm, total victory arrives only after the hero defeats the monster in the wild, away from the protection and security of human structures. I will therefore examine the interior and exterior worlds in Beowulf and other medieval literature to better understand the mythic and elemental importance of the doorway in the early medieval world of northwest Europe.

Larissa Tracy
Longwood University
Torture and Orthodoxy in Late Medieval Hagiography
Medieval torture is most commonly associated with judicial proceedings against heretics during the period of inquisitorial courts, specifically the Albigensian Crusade in the thirteenth century and onward, including the inception of the notorious Spanish inquisition of 1470. Inquisitorial torture has been indelibly imbedded in the minds of modern audiences through popular culture that portrays torture as an indispensable part of medieval judicial procedure, characterized by the depiction of such figures as Bernard Gui, presented to the twentieth century as the evil inquisitor of The Name of the Rose, by Umberto Eco, with his toys of torture that he employs with sadistic delight masked by righteous authority. The prevalence of torture in medieval religious literature largely coincides with the reintroduction of Roman law into European jurisprudence in the thirteenth century, but it exists in the earliest extant examples of medieval hagiography. Torture is a common motif in religious literature, in part because of its renewed place in legal procedure, but also because torture serves a didactic and instructive purpose in these texts, elevating the sanctity of the martyr and demonizing the brutal and savage pagan judges who persecute them. In this way, hagiography, specifically the vitae of the fifteenth-century Gilte Legende, emphasizes the brutality of the “other” as a means of further enhancing the corporeal sacrifice of the saint. However, the form and frequency of torture in these texts may have also provided models of resistance and defiance to later heretical sects who saw themselves and their suffering at the hands of Church authorities in the stories of early Christen saints. While torture was historically employed against heretics to extract a confession and a recantation of heresy, in hagiography the saints resist torture and do not recant their belief, urging defiance in the face of torture, unintentionally providing a model for heretics to resist torture at the hands of inquisitors and reject Church authority. Torture in religious narratives becomes a double-edged sword as the Church waged its war against heresy and violated its own principles regulating the use of torture in ecclesiastical court proceedings, plummeting into corruption and abuse that would invariably spark further dissent and could be inverted to provide a model for heretical sects against orthodox authority.

Elizabeth Moore Hunt
“Beyond the Bestiary: An Illuminated De animalibus (MS 271) in Merton College Library”

Merton College in Oxford, England, has the oldest college library in England on record; the first mention of it dates to 1274. Like many medieval college libraries, the collection contains numerous texts by Aristotle. Few, however, are illuminated with initials to divide books or chapters. A manuscript copy of De animalibus, Merton College MS 271, is unique because the divisions are decorated with images along the borders of the text to accompany the illustrated initials. Overall, around twenty scenes illustrate animals and humans copulating, and around ten compositions include the body parts of diverse animals.

It is often understood in medieval art that the margins are the physical space where monsters, disorder, and unreason reign. Yet the margins also function as the space where commentators write their gloss on the text, and often images work in a similar way to echo particular themes in the text. The unusual imagery of Merton MS 271 provides a unique opportunity to enquire about the reception of Aristotle’s scientific approach to nature in thirteenth-century Oxford.

Final Logo!

2008-09-17T14:05:00.001-07:00

LoGo FinalGo

2008-09-10T11:27:00.000-07:00

Hi all,

Mearcstapa Artist-in-Residence Nick Deford has worked up two new designs based on the suggestions from Jeff Massey and others. I think these are both beautiful, and I'd wear a shirt with either on it. Please take a look at these, and another look at the original designs, and cast your vote, so we can have an official logo, and can get it to Rikk Mulligan, our Webmaster.

New Design 1:

New Design 2:

Logo input from Jeff

2008-08-07T14:03:00.000-07:00

FROM JEFF MASSEY:

I'm keen on all the designs (excellent job, Nick!), but in case we haven't tallied the votes just yet, here's my two cents:
#1 (the supine lizard): I like the subtext of our topic "playing dead" but perhaps we should be a bit more optimistic to start.
#2 & #3 (M@): I really like the calligraphic M in the mod-techno @ with a hint of monstrosity. I liked the idea so much, in fact, that I doodled a few similar designs (see attached TIFs). If I had to pick, this is the one I'd get a tattoo of.
#4 (fetal lizard): I like the details here the most (and the "turned on its ear" orientation), but I fear that the Right-to-Lifers will sue us for copyright infringement.
#5 (Nessie): I'm fond of this as well, but since I'm medievally minded, I don't like the modern sans-serif font. Thus, I've doodled a few variations on that theme as well (again, see attached). Again, sorry to join the conversation so late, but I'm terribly pleased that we'll have a logo to hawk at the Zoo. If Cafe Press is amenable, I also suggest we all get temporary logo tattoos for the weekend.

—Jeff
[Editor's note: Temporary?]

Logo

2008-07-29T12:58:00.000-07:00

Hi all. As you know, Nick Deford has been thinking about logo design for MEARCSTAPA. He and I have been talking about ideas, and we agree (though this is open for discussion) than something simple and graphic would be more effective for this purpose than something more fully drawn. The logo bar that I made for the blog (look up) is pretty (I think), but many people have not realized that I intended the C with the dragon to be part of the word, and think that it is MEARSTAPA.

So, to that end, Nick has worked up a few basic designs for your commentary. I think that they are really cool, and I think that they read graphically very well for a website, journal, and I already want a t-shirt with one on the front, and the full name spelled out on the back.

I am partial to one or two of these, but will refrain from weighing in for the moment. Please do comment, suggest, etc. We might also go with a color (these B/W are just concept sketches), etc. Comment away!

Old Logo 1:
Old Logo 2:

Old Logo 3:

Old Logo 4:

Old Logo 5:

Shameless Plug

2008-05-30T06:23:00.000-07:00

Maps and Monsters in Medieval England is now out in paperback due to, as my editor put it "consistently strong sales." So: In the interest of selling a few, they can be found here.

Since the hardback is now $110 (egad), the 40 bucks is a (comparatively) good deal. Buy a few and convince the publisher that monsters are a hot topic, so they will publish more in our ever-growing field!

Cybrids

2008-05-21T19:50:00.000-07:00

Seems our work on hybrids will set us up to be best enabled to handle the (somewhat frightful) techno-cyto-hybridized beings of the future. Sort of. Check out this NYTimes article.

The Wonders of Seersucker

2008-05-19T12:35:00.000-07:00

From Brian Hoggard, a photo from our inaugural meeting. He writes:

I know there's already an excellent napkin pic on the blog site but thought I should contribute this in the interests of the heritage of the group. I have another photo taken without flash if you wish to have that too.

I'm looking forward to moments of intense monstrosity with this group.

Brian.

www.apotropaios.co.uk

KZoo proposals are in

2008-05-18T12:40:00.000-07:00

Thanks to Phillip, our proposals for Kalamazoo 2009 are in. Most interestingly, as Phillip writes, "the Kalamazoo folks wrote to me on Friday confirming receipt of the MEARCSTAPA proposals, but asked for a constitution or mission statement about who we are and what we do, so I copied the mission statement directly off the blog page and sent it to them." So, thanks again, Derek, for drafting our mission statement, as it has already proved useful. Now, we wait to see what the Kalamazoo Kommittee makes of it all.......

Our first act

2008-05-15T14:02:00.000-07:00

Thanks to Phillip, the session proposals are in, with three send and one of those co-sponsored by the Research Group on Manuscript Evidence (Production and Reproduction, chosen because it seemed to have the most potential for manuscript evidence).

With these proposals sent in, we have made or first act as an organization! Not bad, since we were founded less than a week ago! Thanks all and sundry for the help.

An Organization is Born (on a napkin...)

2008-05-14T16:53:00.000-07:00

As requested, here are our Founding Documents, to be treasured along with the Magna Carta, and one day surely housed in the British Museum.

Showing our first serious contender for a name, FAMILIAR, and our proposed journal, MOTHRA (Monstrous Organization for Theoretical Hermeneutic Research, Annual), and a proposed motto: "We are the edge."*

The reverse of Kalamazoo, Peninsula MS Napkin 1, showing two proposed sub-committees, WOLVES (Working Organization for Lycanthropic Vestiges in Extant Sources) and WONDERS (Working Organization Narrowly Devoted to the East as a Research Subject). Also showing proposed MEARCSTAPA, but without successful acronymage.

Kalamazoo, Peninsula MS Receipt 1, showing successful acronymage of MEARCSTAPA.

*A note on the scribal hand: These documents are clearly to product of an amateur scribe, perhaps of a provincial scriptorium. Palaeography proves difficult, with several abbreviations, but no abbreviation marks found in Capelli's match to aid in deciphering.

Research Group Co-Sponsorship?

2008-05-14T16:33:00.000-07:00

Hi all,

Mildred Budny (whom many of you know from the sessions at this year's KZoo), Director of the Research Group on Manuscript Evidence, has suggested that the RGME Co-Sponsor one of our session for next year, thereby increasing the chance that they take all three. Phillip (our session organizer, bibliographer, kilt-wearer, and, apparently, nerf herder) and I agree this would be a great move. The proposals are due tomorrow, so any comments are welcome QUICKLY.

Send your publications to Phillip!

2008-05-13T13:11:00.000-07:00

Philip has offered to compile a list of publications by group members to be housed on our eventual website. Please provide a list of publications to Philip at phillip.bernhardthouse@gmail.com.

Kalamazoo 2009

2008-05-13T12:38:00.001-07:00

Amazingly, we already need to send in our session proposals for Kalamazoo 2009. Phillip Bernhardt-House has very kindly written up three proposals for us, in the hopes that the Kalamazoo Kommittee will take two. Send comments asap, if you have any, since these need to be sent in by Thursday:

Monstrous Production and Reproduction

The medieval accounts of origins for monstrous creatures are varied and diverse, ranging from tracing these beings' lineage from Cain or Ham (as in the Old English Beowulf and the Hiberno-Latin Sex Aetates Mundi), to placing their beginnings in the curse of a saint from more recent times (as in Giraldus Cambrensis' Topographia Hiberniae or in the Old Norse Konungs Skuggsia), to even some texts which attribute monstrosity to what we would call "environmental factors" (e.g. the Rothschild Canticles). The methods by which individual monsters and monstrous races reproduce their anomalous physiologies are also equally varied, if and when such processes are outlined when they are not implied or assumed. Papers in this panel will focus on these accounts of the creation and procreation of monsters, both in a narrative sense and/or a textual sense (i.e. tracing the origins of a particular monstrous motif), and will illuminate how these accounts not only demonstrate the intentions and understanding of their textual authors and audiences, but also how these tales interpret and define the fears as well as ideals of humans in the past and present toward physiology, cosmology, ethics, sexuality, and the general existence in and engagement with the world-at-large.

Speculum Monstrarum: Monsters as Reflections and Shadows in Medieval Cultures

Monsters are always, in some sense, reflections of the human image, whether those reflections are simply a reversal of the original, or a distorted fun-house mirror producing surprising and frightening results. In a psychological sense, monsters are often an exhibition of the "shadow side" of humanity, that part which is never far away and bears an outline in common with the original object, and yet it never disappears unless the human object is entirely engulfed in darkness. As a result, study of the monstrous image can provide a profound insight into what a culture understands as the "light side" or original image of the human, in addition to an articulation of its opposite and what is excluded in the comprehension and construction of the human. Further to the exploration of these issues, this panel may also seek--like the speculum principis and virtuous conduct treatises of the premodern period--to attempt providing an idealized template of what constitutes a "good monster" (not necessarily in the moral sense) in both composition and behavior on a narrative level.

"Monster Culture (Seven Theses)": A Roundtable

Jeffrey Jerome Cohen's now paradigmatic manifesto on the importance of studying monsters and the monstrous, both generally in all time periods and cultures as well as in strictly medieval contexts, has influenced and inspired countless students exposed to his text in undergraduate courses, and likewise a great many working scholars and the studies they have produced since its publication in 1996. As an inaugural event for MEARCSTAPA, we seek in this roundtable to re-familiarize ourselves with the critical issues of the text, but also to evaluate, reconsider, and extend these theses for future consideration and deployment in subsequent studies. Founding members of MEARCSTAPA will share their interpretations and experiences of the text in research and teaching, and we will seek to have Cohen act as a respondent to the issues raised.

Mission Statement

2008-05-13T12:31:00.000-07:00

Derek Newman-Stille has written up a draft of a mission statement that I think is great. Here it is. Please comment on it!

MEARCSTAPA (Monsters: the Experimental Association for the Research of Cryptozoology through Scholarly Theory And Practical Application) Mission Statement

MEARCSTAPA is an organization committed to the scholarly examination of monstrosity as an area of social and cultural interest to past and present societies. Our inter/trans/post/pre-disciplinary approach allows us to explore the significance of monstrosity across cultural, temporal, and geographic boundaries. We are interested in a multivalent approach using materials on monsters and monstrosity from literary, artistic, philosophical, and historical sources.

The term "Mearcstapa" not only evokes the Grendelkin, perhaps the standard bearers for medieval monstrosity, but also describes the role of Monster Studies within (or outside of) "traditional" academics. Those who study monstrosity take on the role of Border-Walkers, broaching numerous traditional academic divides.

We recognize that human societies reveal a great deal about themselves in the monsters they create, and that the monstrous can be a mechanism for expressing social issues, interests, anxieties, and ideologies.

Our membership is international and is composed of scholars from a wide variety of academic disciplines including, but not limited to, Medieval Studies, English Literature, French Literature, Cultural Studies, History, Ancient History and Classics, Celtic Studies, Anthropology, Archaeology, Disability Studies, Gender Studies, Folklore Studies, and Art History.

MEARCSTAPA was established in May, 2008 for the purpose of providing a forum for discussion about monstrosity in various media.

Welcome to Mearcstapa!

2008-05-13T12:27:00.000-07:00

This blog site will suffice until we can get an actual site. In the meantime, it will allow us to work out some of the details.

First, I've quickly tinkered up the logo/banner above -- I didn't have a nice M on hand to use, but I love this C, from the Trinity College copy of Priscian's Grammar, and thought it worked well in the center of the name. This is just an idea, not a mandate, so comments are welcome!