Gates, Hats, and Naked Jews: Sorting out the Nubian Guards on the Ebstorf Map

Medieval Christian mapmakers represented a range of peoples, animals and monsters against which they defined their place what they believed to be God’s divine plan. Rooted in earlier anti-Semitic tropes, the detailed world maps of the thirteenth/early fourteenth centuries contain multiple problematic representations of Jews, perceived at once as distant in time and space, and also eminently current and local. While some of these images are expected – Biblical characters appear frequently – others are harder to explain. This essay attempts to grapple with the Ebstorf Map’s peculiar image of the guards of the Nubian Gate, presented as giant, armed, naked Jewish men. Rather than offer a clear-cut explanation for these curious figures, the essay places them in a context where such representations become at least possible. It then considers some differences in anti-Semitic tropes between then and now, to further clarify how these figures might have been viewed by their original audience

England is the World and the World is England

Medieval Christians arguably lived in a ‘real’ world – a tangible place in which they lived, worked, loved, hated, and died – but through a process of worldbuilding continually reconstructed it anew around themselves as the mythical land they called ‘Christendom.’ This was predicated first on reconceptualizing and then ultimately on removing (or attempting to remove) the non-Christians in their midst. In twelfth- and thirteenth-century England, Jews were the prime focus of such efforts, demonized and monsterized, and then expelled en masse. Still, it seems that every work that seeks to reconstruct England by othering Jews also undercuts its efforts by collapsing differences in time and space, so that England becomes everywhere, and the present moment becomes everywhen. This brief essay will consist of a whirlwind tour through the Hereford Map, tracing various vectors along its buckling surface, to and from that small, marginalized protuberance at the lower-left corner of creation – Britain

Sea Monsters, edited by Thea Tomaini and Asa Simon Mittman

BEACHES GIVE AND TAKE, bringing unexpected surprises to society, and pulling essentials away from it. The ocean offers monsters— whales and whirlpools—but when a massive creature is pushed into human proximity by the ocean’s wide shoulders, the waves deposit and erode human assumptions about itself and its environment: words, sounds, breath, water, wind, flesh, blood, and bones wash in and out. Chance encounters reveal us to ourselves anew; we recognize an Otherness and thereby gain an ethical understanding of difference. Learning to read the monster’s environmental signs helps humans determine the scope of the monster’s place in the eco/cosmic timeline and defeat it—until the epic cycle inevitably repeats. We confront our tiny time between catastrophes; monsters live and live and live. Even so, when humans identify and face monsters, we do so at the risk of exposing our own monstrosity. When we look into the inky backs of whales, or deep into vortices, what do we see? This volume of essays emerges from MEARCSTAPA’s panel, “The Nature of the Beast/Beasts of Nature: Monstrous Environments,” at the 3rd Biennial Meeting of the BABEL Working Group, held at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where the Pacific Ocean lays her face against the sand and waits

Research Companion to Monsters and the Monstrous

The field of monster studies has grown significantly over the past few years and this companion provides a comprehensive guide to the study of monsters and the monstrous from historical, regional and thematic perspectives. The collection reflects the truly multi-disciplinary nature of monster studies, bringing in scholars from literature, art history, religious studies, history, classics, and cultural and media studies. The companion will offer scholars and graduate students the first comprehensive and authoritative review of this emergent field

Inconceivable Beasts: The ‘Wonders of the East’ in the Beowulf Manuscript

Bound with Beowulf, the Old English Wonders of the East, a catalogue of marvelous beings, describes the very creatures it depicts as ungefrægelicu (unheard of, inconceivable). Insistently, these representations, both visual and textual, provoke questions about the nature and possibility of representation itself. In doing so, they also destabilize the notion of scholarship as being able to provide final, concrete meanings, even as they suggest the possibility for other ways of approaching meanings, including the question of what it meant—and means—to be a monster, and thus to be human. Containing the first color facsimile of the Wonders, transcription, translation and extensive commentary, this volume should be of interest to students and scholars of Old English literature, Anglo-Saxon art, and monster studies