The Monstrous Other in Medieval Art

good evening everyone my name is Joshua dress the assistant curator of medieval and renaissance manuscripts here at the Morgan Library tonight I have the distinct pleasure of introducing our two speakers ace Amit Minh and Cheri Lindquist the guest curators of the newly opened exhibition medieval monsters terrors aliens wonders if you haven't had the chance to see the show yet I highly encourage you to visit the gallery after the lecture the museum will remain open until 9 o'clock this evening if you'd like to find out more about other scheduled events relating to the exhibition you can pick up a calendar as you leave the auditorium and I'd also like to mention that there is a wonderful book catalog associated with this exhibition and you can purchase that at the gift shop so bringing together more than 60 examples from the Morgan's renowned collection of illuminated manuscripts as well as select loans from the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston the exhibition examines the various functions of monsters and the monstrous in medieval societies this spectacular display of art ranging across the entire span of the European Middle Ages from the 9th to the 16th centuries was made possible through the generous support of an anonymous gift in the memory of Melvin our seeding the Jeannine Luke and Melvin our seed and fund for exhibitions and publications the Andrew W mellon research and publications fund the National Endowment for the Arts and mrs. Alexander P Rosenberg unlike other exhibitions or even books dedicated to the topic of medieval monsters this current exhibition breaks new ground by challenging us to think critically about the very idea of the monstrous in the Middle Ages and how it could serve as a way of engaging with the unknown the foreign and the supernatural this truly transformative approach to the topic is the result of the guest curators long-standing engagement with the material which I hope will be evident from even this brief overview of their careers as scholars ASA Simon Mittman is professor and chair of art and art history at California State University Chico he is the author of maps and monsters in medieval England from 2006 co-author of inconceivable beasts the wonders of the east and the Beowulf manuscript into 13 and author and co-author of numerous articles on monstrosity and marginality including pieces on Satan and race in the Middle Ages he edited the research companion to monsters and the monstrous in 2012 and is currently co heading a monster studies source reader as well as a volume on monstrosity disability and the posthuman in the medieval and early modern worlds share ECM link Lindquist is the associate professor of art history at Western Illinois University and currently holds the Dorothy Kaiser hollenberg chair of excellence in art history at the University of Memphis for the term 2017 to 2019 her publications include agency visuality and society at the chartreuse of shot ball from 2008 meanings of nudity and medieval art from 2012 and numerous articles on medieval and renaissance art and visual culture gender neo-gothic architecture and the history of museums her activities as a curator included exhibition on medieval monsters at the Figge Art Museum in 2013 as well as monster Marx which is currently on view until July 23rd at the Art Museum of the University of Memphis as you can see it would be hard to imagine a better pair of curators for an exhibition on medieval monsters having worked with them myself on the show over the course of the past three years I can say that it is not just their deep knowledge of the subject matter but also their unflagging enthusiasm and their collegial spirit that make them truly ideal collaborators with that please join me in welcoming sheri Lindquist and ace ammendment who will be speaking to us tonight about the monstrous other and medieval art [Applause] thank you all thank you so much for coming a wealthy French reader seated comfortably perhaps in his or her home and on je pages through a remarkable new book a wondrous volume just completed it is a book of the marvels of the world and it contains within it over 50 illuminations of locations throughout the world near and far highlighting purported curiosities of their landscapes flora fauna and people's through the lens of this book everywhere and everyone becomes exciting and exotic but not equally so the peoples of Britain and France and Germany might have unusual hats or unusual cows but the peoples of more distant regions are vastly more remarkable and the differences from their readers more dramatically pronounced among the more wondrous locales in this book of marvels of the world is Ethiopia crammed into this illustration are two dozen beings at the upper left there are dragons and basal escs monsters that hatch from chicken eggs and then can turn a person to stone with a glance there's a giant bird of prey with ram's horns this may be the mythical Phoenix who though utterly alone is the only one of its kind lives forever by immolating itself upon a pyre when it approaches 500 years old only to emerge from the fires restored to youth but it is depictions of unusual peoples that are both the focus of this image and the focus of our talk tonight at the lower left are cave dwelling lizard eaters just past them striding to the right is a wild man a sort of Sasquatch figure highly popular in medieval art and one will return to he carries a rough-hewn Club that indicates both his strength and his barbarity above him are pair of blennies also surprisingly in popular in medieval art these are people with no heads who bare their faces on their chests according to some texts they're eight feet tall to their right are people who worship a dog Idol they're up at the top probably a veiled anti-muslim insult which I'll talk about later the naked philosophers known as Jim no Sophists are here ascetics clothed in hair shirts like John the Baptist appear a golden giant naked women who converse calmly in public with naked men as if there's nothing odd about that people who cannot stand and so crawl upon the ground a furry giant known as a pan OT whose ears are so large that he sleeps in them at night using one beneath him as a mattress and the other over him as a coverlet each figure is individually diverting but collectively these alien beings render Ethiopia as a wild land a world turned upside down where Europe's conventions practices and mores are openly rejected returning to the Bellamy's roughly at the center of the image we find that they are gesturing as if in conversation the closer one emphatically sex does mal frowns while pointing at the naked philosophers and a king the other apparently seated on the ground bears a more ambiguous expression the illumination seems to invite us to speculate what are they talking about what are they thinking what do these people make of those people and what are we seated on our comfortable cushion back at home and friends it's supposed to make of it all medieval authors and artists frequently present presented beings like these in collective sets in conglomerations of difference of strangeness of what academics have taken to calling other nests this group of peoples is part of a loose set that first appears in classical sources their ultimate origins are somewhat obscure but they seem to have made it into classical art and literature via a pair of Greek travelers Theseus and McCaslin EES who claim to have learned about these peoples in India and Persia and whose accounts were then borrowed and popularized by the Greek historian Herodotus whose reports were then borrowed and turned by the first century Roman Pliny the Elder for his widely popular Natural History's from there they're disseminated throughout numerous classical and medieval genres such beings headless Bloomie's lizard eating cave dwellers and the rest are grouped together in books of Marvel's like this French manuscript that opens the aliens section of our exhibition they appear in bestiaries that is books of beasts they're popular in travel logs whether rooted in actual travelers travels like those of the famous explorer Marco Polo or placed in entirely fictional narratives like the book of John Mandeville a forged account of the wide-ranging journeys of as this text tells us one quote John Mandeville night although I am not worthy born and raised in England in the town of st. Albans who from there have crossed the sea in the year thirteen 22 they were also clustered together on many of the world maps that survived from the Middle Ages such as this tiny gem of a map here you see it blown up to 15 feet tall in fact it is about three inches in diameter it was made in 13th century England probably for a royal patron and appears as a sort of frontispiece to a book of the psalms a simpler medieval map will help orient you the medieval globe has just the three continents then-known which are the three accounted for in the Bible which was considered the most reliable of all sources so Asia Europe Africa Asia is perhaps surprisingly at the top that is medieval maps are generally oriented toward the Orient hence the origin of that term Asia's importance reflected in its literally superior position was based on its role as the site of Jerusalem and of the Garden of Eden seen as a literal tangible place in the easternmost edge of the inhabitable landmass as well as the location of all the main events in the life of Jesus from his birth in Bethlehem to his baptism in the River Jordan through his preaching miracle-working arrests torture death and resurrection at the apex of the map Christ is flanked by sensing angels he's blessing with one hand and holding an orb of the world which medieval artists and authors knew to be a sphere in his other on the other end of the nadir pressed down by the weight of the world or a pair of wyverns two-legged dragons symbolizing evil like most such maps called map by Monday literally meaning cloths or sheets of the world Jerusalem is at the very center the navel of the world aligned vertically with Christ the Garden of Eden and the rivers of paradise and the vertical Mediterranean known in the Middle Ages as moiré magnum the Great Sea at the lower right as you have surely already spotted are another set of monstrous wondrous peoples here they appear to be locked in little blue and orange boxes bounded to the north by the waters of the Nile and to the south by the waters of the great ocean that encircles the ecumenical world working from West East that is from bottom to top we encounter the following an anthropological us that is a dog headed human eater who is munching on a human leg in anthropophaga s-- that's a cannibal also eating a human leg a crawling him antipode ace an antelope riding cave-dwelling troglodyte in epipheo with his eyes on his shoulders and his close cousin in our old friend the blenny with his face on his chest a large lipped I'm a tree I a single footed skia pod who runs very swiftly and uses his large foot to shade himself from the hot southern Sun a four-eyed more itani Ethiopia's whose excellent sight makes him a formidable Archer the saw Meyer II who are immune to snake venom and who expose their newborn infants to ASPs and Vipers as a sort of high-stakes paternity test a person who speaks using gestures a tiny mouth straw drinker an Arab itt's who walks stooped over and last of all people without noses these are not to be taken as one-off individuals not as singular omens which were refer to in the period as prodigal births like the two-headed calf born in Nuremberg and illustrated by the great German printmaker Albrecht Durer rather they are sing mating breeding groups this is made clear by the frequent presentation of pairs of figures an occasional even of monster families that mirror and parody human family structures of mom dad and baby as in the case of these families of pano tea and wild people the importance of reproduction to an understanding of these beings is also accentuated by the vigorous sexing of such figures who often bear oversized brightly colored or otherwise emphasized genitals all the more striking in the context of the generally discreet art of the Middle Ages as in this page from an English manuscript of the book of Mandeville but what are we to call them the terminology here matters a great deal traditional scholarship has since the 19th century called these groups of beings the plinian races due to their popularization by plenty the elder or perhaps more commonly the monstrous races what does it mean to call these peoples monstrous races or races at all the Middle Ages as has been noted by other scholars did not exactly have a word for race that maps perfectly onto the modern term medieval Latin texts call such groups dens not you or Ghent ace terms that are about lineage and lines of descent not EO gives us both nation and natal as in pre natal early medieval English authors used Mon tune which is a kind of man and Middle English authors used keep kinnda kind and then eventually kin family race though doesn't appear until the late 15th century and it is there used to refer to different stat a difference of status rather than of what we might think of as race indeed its earliest known usage is in Jacques de bracy's the hunt a poem written at the end of the 15th century where it's used to describe hunting dogs it goes on to be used to describe groups of animals and then to distinguish between noble and common animals between hunting greyhounds and ordinary watch dogs following this usage then comes to be applied to noble people especially those of so-called royal blood this use of race is different in substantive ways from modern usage as it was used to distinguish not only one type of dog from another but also people of a certain position in the social hierarchy from those of another position regardless of shared political space equally European ancestry similar phenotype and on that is French royalty was considered a different quote-unquote race than French peasantry this should serve as a reminder that systems of race are and have been since the term was first used in any language not neutral descriptors of human variety but pointed systems of hierarchy as we confront these monstrous something's these monstrous someone's we must keep very much in mind that these headless people these dog worshippers and cannibals and dog heads and lizard eaters and the rest were considered to be the real and living inhabitants of Ethiopia as such fun though they are to look at they're also part of a long and deeply pernicious strategy of demonizing real groups of people this persistent tactic running from at least as far back as the ancient conflicts between the Greeks and Persians and prevalent throughout the world's history is the depiction of cultural others as not or perhaps not quite human well this rhetorical strategy was not codified under the rubric of race until the Enlightenment it was clearly present in visual and textual rhetoric for much longer yes Carl Linnaeus the Enlightenment biologist who gives us the Linnaean taxonomy by which every organism gets classed by genus and species who in the first edition of his Systema naturae published in 1735 divides humans Homo sapiens the term he gives us into four sub species Europe a us a fur ez Atticus and americanus he then unsurprisingly concludes that the most advanced is Homo Europe s but he did not actually invent this No of strategic hierarchical categorization rather he merely adapted long-standing models for the characterizing classifying and cataloguing of human difference into the new scientific paradigm we should therefore not be surprised to find that in the tenth edition of this very popular work he added two subcategories of Homo sapiens Homo sapiens faris that is feral or wild people and Homo sapiens monstroso's that is monstrous people to be clear the modern term race refers not to a biological fact but an ideology a horrible one used to justify repression slavery and genocide well neither the word race nor the pseudo scientific ideology of race as we know it existed before the 15th century the Middle Ages was not innocent of what we would recognize as racial prejudice words like Jen's naughty ogen taste Mong kun and kinnda nation people blood tribe and lineage had racial implications and certainly people were stigmatized oppressed exiled and murdered based on perceived differences of those considered outsiders a number of scholars find aspects of modern racial ideologies what might be called proto racism that eventually though it should be emphasized not inevitably converged in the modern version of racism historian robert bartlett argues that the middle age in the Middle Ages ethnicity was situational and strategic determined not by skin colour or physical characterize characteristics per se but by religion language law and custom then as now denigrated denigrating attitudes and hateful beliefs were effectively conveyed in image [Applause] this 15th century tapestry presiding Majesty really over the exhibition can help us further explore the complexities of representations of the monstrous other and medieval art clearly designed to impress and delight and an extraordinarily valuable object when it was made the 16 foot long highly accomplished weaving is finished on both sides with the faces painted and embroidered the crests and shields in the lower border indicate that it may commemorate an alliance between two aw station noble families on the far right on the far I'm sorry I'm the far left a band of giant furry wild men attack a castle inhabited by what 15th century people would have identified as Moors or Saracens that is fictionalized racialized denigrated notions of dark-skinned Muslims some of the Moors in the tapestries including the king and queen are shown with exaggerated features large eyes bright red lips and absolutely black skin part of a recurrent European tradition of stereotyping and demonizing people of African descent this is particularly evident when comparing their faces to those of the light-skinned Wildmon who are shown with more naturalistic modulations and skin tone as well as individualized features and expressions both the wild men and the Moors were conceived as foreign peoples inhabiting lands far away like the exotic beings appearing on the maps and in the books of Marvel's that ASA discussed such exotic beings appearing freak hearing frequently in European Christian art of the Middle Ages served to object lesson lessons in the first place they are meant to teach norms by negative example the dominant ideology in medieval Europe privileged predominantly light-skinned and wealthy heterosexual able-bodied Christian males the ruling class was typically represented clothed self-possessed and restrained in pose and expression like the Christ on the Psalter map it is important to note that what this model promulgated as normative was not normal or common in fact it excluded the majority of the population some of the contorted nude human aid humanoids in the Psalter map are literally beastial and others lack even minimal evidence of civilization from the European perspective such as wearing clothes or refraining from cannibalism presented as exotic barbarians at the edge of the world they were meant to reinforce the presumed superiority of European Christians their religion and their culture the second lesson conveyed by monstrous peoples is theological their significance is taken up by the early Christian African Bishop Saint Augustine of Hippo whose influence on the theological infrastructure of Christianity Christianity is incalculable he asserts that man was made one even woman was made from him there are not several races of men as there are species of herbs and trees fishes and winged creatures serpents wild beasts and grazing animals in order to contend with the monstrous peoples believed to exist at the far reaches of the earth Augustine wrote in his blockbuster book the City of God these things which happen contrary to nature and are called monsters phenomena portents prodigies ought to demonstrate portend predict that God will bring to pass what he has foretold regarding the bodies of men no difficulty preventing him no law of nature prescribing to him his limit in other words prodigies and monsters exist to show that God can do what he wishes that he can make humanoids with dogs heads or no heads even as he can resurrect human bodies at the end of time and cause their flesh to burn eternally in hell if he sees fit Agustin is not sure that the monstrous peoples described by plenty and others exist but if they do their humanity is not to be determined by their physical qualities whoever is anywhere born a man that is a rational mortal animal no matter what unusual appearance he presents in color movement sound nor how peculiar he is in some power part or quality of his nature no Christian can doubt that he Springs from one protoplast that is Adam thus those who are ruled by the flesh rather than the rational soul as women were thought to be distance themselves from reason and deficiency of the rational soul placed one's Humanity in question lack of rational capacity diminishes the ability to recognize God as exhibited by heretics infidels pagans and sinners negative associations with dark skin derived from metaphors connecting darkness with evil and light with good which proliferated in the ancient world including among classical writings and Jewish and Christian commentaries on the Bible it was the 3rd century theologian Origen another of the most influential early Christian church fathers who extended the metaphor to dark-skinned Ethiopians who came to symbolize sin for him and the Christian tradition he influenced it is important to emphasize that the medieval European notion of Ethiopia had no basis in ethnographic or Geographic fact indeed the Latin name Ethiopian not the indigenous name of any African group derives from the Greek literally meaning burned faced people dark-skinned Ethiopians came to symbolize evil as inscribed on the ax bodies of imagined sinners or even demons this is one of many possible examples in which demons are not just dark-skinned but seem to be given stereotypical African features Origen argued that the Ethiopians mentioned in the Bible symbolized the Gentiles whose hearts were black and spirit but who became white and fair upon conversion Jean's our soul a fifteenth century theologian influenced at influential at the time our tapestry was made I'll tell you about that in a minute wrote that the image of God imprinted on the mirrors of our souls becomes clouded with dark shadows of vices and evil and base worldly and fleshly desires according to him we must strive to embody virtue since the imagination of an Ethiopian leads to the likeness of an Ethiopian rather than the image of God thus an inconsistent code in medieval texts and images arose that marked humans and humanoids considered primitive inferior corruptible or evil these characteristics include best geo elements horns tails pubs awkward and disproportionate bodies exaggerated expressions and/or caricatured face facial features sexual and other behaviors that contravene social expectations strange or inadequate clothing and also dark skin metaphorically ones moral behavior could cause one to change back and forth from from black to white or human to subhuman indeed a few such texts such as the middle Chaucer curse or moon deposit that conversion to Christianity Christianity would literally physically transform a figure from black and blue as led to white as milk this is a theme evident in the margins of a prayer book I address in a forthcoming article the hours of Mary of Burgundy in which the princess is famously shown devoutly contemplating her book in it she confronts a series of wild people and other anti human or human-like anti models on one folio a sinful soul mentioned in the nearby text is cavorting with a diaphanous veil that dips into a V to emphasize her sex she is to be associated with the one-footed skia pod opposite her in this opening one of the so called monstrous peoples illustrated on the Psalter map that ASA introduced her sinful ways are endangering her human status a point demonstrated when Mary turned to folio to find the figure in the same place on the verso among strawberries that stand for the base desires of the flesh apparently morphing into a less than human wild woman this marginal vignette makes explicit that moralizing and condemned Natori valence 'as of representations of exotic peoples illustrating our atlas of the marvelous peoples of the world wild people were conflated with Ethiopians as is evident from the furry wild man with his primitive club sorry I should have shown you that it's not as sensitive as I thought it was while people were conflated with Ethiopians as is evident from the furry Wildmon and his primitive club striding across the foreground of the rendering of Ethiopia despite the long-standing connection for Europeans between Ethiopia and dark-skinned dark-skinned people are curiously absent from this image of Ethiopia suggesting a kind of interchangeability of characteristics denoting the other dangerous difference is marked for the European reader not merely by the bodies of these wondrous peoples but also by their religion their law customs and presumably language it must be said that these kinds of prairie and images of fantastic creatures and unfamiliar naked peoples reveal not only anxiety about difference but also as geoffrey jeremy cohen has argued Jerome Cohen has argued curiosity and desire sometimes we fear our own transgressive desires and we make monsters of them as a kind of safety valve or escapist fantasy one such fantasy among medieval Christian rulers confronting rival Muslim powers was the tale of Prester John a wealthy Christian King a descendant of the Magi who lived somewhere in India or Africa he ruled over the strange peoples and beasts thought to live there and he was ready to put his military might and wealth at the disposal of the Christian kings to defeat the Muslims if only they could find him this 16th century map included in the famous merket or atlas reflects some real advances in map making for navigation since the time of the Salter map and yet it still maps ideology as much as geography we still often use world maps based on mere Couture's map projection which like all maps contains many geographic and ideological distortions this map of the land of Prester John identifies him as ruler of the Ethiopians although Ethiopia functioned for Europeans as a sign for difference which could be and was read allegorically as sin as disgust it was also seen as an exotic and elusive source of wonder and wealth it was dangerous and enticing frightening and alluring Portuguese explorers sent to Africa were specifically charged to seek the mythical kingdom of Prester John which of course they did not and could not find representations of Prester John showed him with both both with light and dark skin he came to be represented with dark skin in later centuries more often as European contact with real Ethiopians became more common we have seen that in our medieval travelogue the inhabitants of Ethiopia are light-skinned the only dark-skinned people represented in this manuscript full of exotic locales and their improbable denizens are shown in Europe dark sent dark-skinned soldiers with tights with tight curls held back in headbands reminiscent of turbans join several long bearded Saracen types also wearing the headbands they are lined up in front of a palace or mosque with exoticized onion domes one has a conical hat and another is conspicuously armed with a prodigious scimitar these are mores than dark-skinned Muslims who are pointedly contrasted with white knights illustrating a chauvinistic text that reads in part the men of Europe are handsomer and stronger than those of Africa a book such as this pictures feelings both of threat and desire for the other and other define not by race determined by skin color but by a constellation of cultural characteristics presented either with the lack of accuracy or with total fantasy all filtered through a lens of bias this discussion of medieval European attitudes towards mobsters and men wild men and moors lends insight into our understanding of the Alsatian tapestry we began with here moors and also inhabit a landscape with wild men and exotic beasts such as monkeys and lions a dragon and a unicorn unlike the wild men the Moors are shown with the trappings of civilization they have a king and queen who live in a castle and wear european-style crowns dressed in rich striped fabrics fur-lined robes and shoes they are equipped with more sophisticated weapons and one may be wearing chainmail possibly this one here in contrast the wild men are armed with sticks and stones and are naked except for some leaves serving as makeshift loin cloths the Giants have claws on their bare feet and their king who has tusks lives in the open with his wild family we see him offering his Queen a haunch of raw meat seemingly sourced from the partially dismembered leopard course corpse at his feet here we go the tableau in which the three wild men bring offerings to their seated queen who is nursing a child seems a deliberate reference to images of the Epiphany when the Three Magi pay homage to the infant Jesus which about this time began to include a Black Mage's in fact the appearance of mores and Wildmon together on the Sabbath's tree is not unrelated to the development of the Black Mage's in art which originated in german-speaking lands around the 13th century although the Gospels are pretty thin on the details about the wise men later commentators determine their number and names and interpreted them as descendants of the three sons of Noah who were each assigned one of the three known continents of the world their attendance on the Christ child was thought to testify to Christianity as a universal religion the majors given the name Balthazar was thought to have been tits descended from Noah son Ham whose descendants Noah cursed because ham possibly mocked his father's drunken nakedness in Genesis 922 biblical commentators placed hams descendants in Africa considered by Western writers to be an inhospitable and sunburnt land that darkened the skin of its inhabitants hence the frequent medieval use of Ethiopian to describe any inhabitant of Africa although Balthazar was described as African since at least the 10th century he was not commonly portrayed with dark skin in European art until the 15th century this change in epiphany iconography has been traced back to the 13th century Hohenstaufen emperors who wish to stress hypothetical claims to sovereignty over certain eastern Mediterranean territories they emphasize their imperial status and ambitions by traveling with a spectacular entourage that concluded black servants and a menagerie of exotic animals as part of this campaign they also transformed the cult of saint maurice an egyptian general who was thought to have been martyred near Magdeburg when he and his christian troops refused to make sacrifices to the roman gods under Hohenstaufen rule saint maurice previously depicted light-skinned was for the first time portrayed as an African dressed as a contemporary knight in sculpture at an Magdeburg Cathedral one of the great masterpieces of high gothic art this new model of black Christian piety and the Holy Roman Empire influenced the representation of the Magi as well whose relics were thought to be housed in the Cathedral of Cologne by the 14th century the Magi were given their own imagined heraldic insignia featuring heads of the Asian and African Kings that in this example betray a measure of caricature the head of st. Maurice and Moors in general appeared in heraldry across Germany and Europe and a number of these are still in use and visible in the public arena some of them like st. Maurice on the crest of the Bavarian city of Coburg were suppressed in the Third Reich and pointedly reintroduced in 1945 this situation is one of many revealing the ongoing complexity of this imagery it can't be seen positive in a way that Coburg quickly asserted in the symbolic realm that they were proud to have their city represented by the image of a black skinned saint in defiance of the shameful racial theories of the Nazis and yet the totem like image of a stylized African head on a manhole cover or a city hall in Germany around the floor of a College Capitol in a chapel in California seemed offensive and troubling in many ways the image of st. Maurice the Black Mage's and the more in European art became increasingly stereotyped and demeaning but also more popular in the 15th century these developments in visual sure no doubt reflected shifting and conflicting responses to cataclysmic events that caused Europeans to adjust their world view including encounters with native peoples in the Americas Africa and elsewhere and the might of the Ottoman Empire which conquered the ancient Christian capital of Constantinople in 1453 in this atmosphere Wildmon could connote a kind of prelapsarian state a noble and potentially convertible savage as hinted in the proto christian epiphany tableau in the Wildmon tapestry like the moors wild men were increasingly popular heraldic emblems in the later Middle Ages and Renaissance we know that one branch of one of the families that commissioned the tapestry the Zorn's incorporated a moor in their arms by commissioning and displaying this wondrous luxury object the families participated in an Imperial tradition that advertised wealth and power through claims of connections to and dominance over the wider world inhabited by vaguely threatening but also marvelous inhabitants like those on the tapestry on the soldier map and in the book of marvels of the world the wild men and moors in the tapestry stood for the other perceived as enemies but also potential converts monstrous subhuman beings nevertheless created to demonstrate God's unlimited power and to be lessons for Christians to avoid the sin believed to have stained the monstrous people's or their ancestors [Applause] brace yourselves gonna get a bit darker yet the strategies of alienation and control the fantasies and fears of the dominant culture that manifests in this tapestry were not limited to the mostly imagined and mostly faraway peoples portrayed in this work our survey of notions of the other of us and them as marshalled and mediated through medieval art must also acknowledge entrenched racial hatred by Christians that was directed toward those others living within Europe the actual Jews and Muslims who lived in many European cities the fear that Jews and Muslims were not in actuality different enough but they might blend in with the Christian community and lead to what they thought of as miscegenation was expressed in the fourth Lateran Council in 1215 where it was decreed that they must distinguish themselves by dress the first concerted effort to enforce this decree was Henry the third of England's Statute of jewelry of 12:53 which mandated the wearing of badges by Jews of yellow felt they were in the shape of the tablets of the law and were mandated to be six inches high and three inches wide small Jewish children were forced to begin wearing them starting at the age of seven an image that cannot help but recall for us the badge is worn by the children of the Holocaust elsewhere Jews accommodated this dictate with various versions of a pointed hat called a Pelias cornutus which became a visual denotation of jews represented in christian art this item of contemporary clothing was included in representations of the Passion of Christ thus collapsing the distance between the ancient past in the medieval present many representations of Christ's tormentors and Passion scenes combined the Jewish hat with features considered negative by Christian artists and audiences such as hook noses long beards on gangly bodies exaggerated facial expressions and swarthy skin even though historically there were no ethnic differences between the Jews blamed with tormenting Christ's and Christ himself and his apostles they are nevertheless represented time and again as physiognomically distinct on the left side of this 13th century prayer book from bamberg we see the Apostles represented in events preceding Christ's arrests from the entry into Jerusalem to Christ addressing God in the Garden of Gethsemane in the top register on the right side only the temple police are shown wearing PII kanuti that are so exaggerated they extend beyond the borders of the miniatures the figures are dressed in short tunics associated with people of lower status the man shown forcefully grasping Christ's left hand has an especially large hooked nose and a bizarre frill protruding from the end of his beard that echoes the ruffled point of his cap even though the gospel texts are clear in stating that it was Roman soldiers who flogged and crucified Christ the middle register shows correct ature Jews meeting out that punishment the figure of Simon of Cyrene whom the Gospels report was compelled by the Romans to assist Christ and carrying the cross as shown with the Jewish hat but without those characteristic character caricature eyes features of the other Jews seen wearing it it may be because Christian theologians saw him as a sympathetic figure underscoring the elision that medieval people regularly made between exterior appearance and interior qualities sometimes Jews were even represented as literal monsters such as in this enamel to ornament from a 13th century traveling chest which shows a wyvern that's a two-legged dragon like we saw lurking beneath Christ's feet on the Psalter map shown here with a bearded human head and a Jews hat and with a closed eye to signal that Jews were blind to Christ's divinity Jews are particularly vilified and famed moralized Bibles created for french royalty in the 13th century where they're shown aligned with the multi-headed false prophet and the Beast of the Apocalypse in one roundel the Archangel Michael forces a crowd of pleading Jews into the mouth of hell alongside the defeated apocalyptic beast in another the heads of the Jews marked by yet more pointed hats seem mere extensions of the many heads of the false prophet as they are all again being thrust into a yawning Hellmouth such images connecting Jews to the tormentors of Christ and demons rationalize hatred for Jews which frequently led to pogroms forced conversions and exile conversion narratives are another part of this ubiquitous anti-jewish propaganda included in one chronicle beginning with Genesis and ending in the reign of Henry ii of England is a miracle of the Virgin involving a Jew from borsch claimed to have occurred in the 6th century according to the story a young Jewish boy captivated by the Christian mass is given communion directly by the Virgin Mary when his father finds out he's enraged and throws the child into a furnace thus he serves serves as an antitype for Abraham whose willingness to sacrifice his son Isaac at God's command is traditionally seen as a virtue the Jews horrified wife runs for help and returns with her Christian neighbors when they put out the flames the boy having been miraculously protected by the Virgin Mary has discovered seated unharmed on the hot coals the Christians then throw the father in the oven which forms a visual parallel to hell there he is entirely consumed by the flames this alleged miracle leads the fictional boy and his mother and other members of the Jewish community of boors to convert to Christianity in this manuscript the story's illustrated with two scenes the father is shown in contemporary 14th century clothing though this story purportedly took place some eight centuries earlier again the figures of the figure wears a pointed hat though in a different style here he is a large and awkward body and a face meant to be read as ugly with an upturned nose designed to evoke a pig's snout associations between Jews and swine whose flesh they were fused to eat were commonly made in slurs against Jews this is explicitly illustrated in images of the so called Uden sow this image partakes of a common ideological strategy we're in particular traits ascribed as a means of rejection are based on anxieties on the part of the culture enacting that rejection the Jewish practice of keeping kosher for example seems to have engendered an anxiety on the part of Christians who while following many biblical injunctions nonetheless chose to eat pork this anxiety surfaced in accounts of the udin sow and other places this 14th century carving from Vinton burg was described in an anti-jewish tract by Martin Luther who writes behind the sow a rabbi is bent over the sow lifting up her right leg holding her tail high and looking intensely under her tail and into her Talmud as though he were reading something acute or extraordinary Jews then having rejected the consumption of pig's flesh as unclean were rendered by those who did eat pork as being engaged and far more foul and scatological activities with pigs thereby rendering Christian pork consumption rather tame act a similar strategy is on view in the Ethiopia image where the bearded figures worshipping an image of a dog are likely intended to represent Muslims Muslims generally avoided both image worship and dogs both of which were widely embraced by Christians and so through the same sort of perverse logic behind the uten sau hymns are here presented worshiping an image of a dog the udin saw image and others like it which schoolchildren in nazi germany were taken to see on field trips it's still prized by neo-nazis understandably the decision to preserve unmediated this brand of hatred in the public square is the subject of controversy in Germany just as preserving Confederate statues that valorize slavery are controversial in the u.s. such defamations across media reinforced one another especially when juxtaposed with more positive representations of the racists in the manuscript showing the tale of the Jew of borscht made about the same time as the Vinton burg utans saw both the Christians stuffing the Jew into the flames and the converted boy or bear headed with delicate features the boy's body sways gracefully as he poignant Lee with and protest the wife doesn't appear in the illustrations and in fact Jewish women are less frequently represented in Christian art of the Middle Ages as they're often less and when they do they're often less caricatured than jewish men one explanation for this offered by the scholar Sarah Lipton is that the hierarchically gendered nature of medieval Christian religious and social thought explains it in fact attitudes toward women in all three Abrahamic faiths drew both from the story of creation in Genesis and ancient medical writings which defined women as inferior in various respects this meant that Jewish women seemed less of a threat than Jewish men to the religious authority of Christian men but the legacy of Eve meant that like Christian women they were still considered dangerous as temptresses whose sexuality needed to be controlled the Illustrated story of the Jew of borscht like the Wildman tapestry like the marvels of the world manuscript like many objects and our medieval monsters exhibit suppress exclude and vilify multiple groups simultaneously Muslims and Africans Jews and women the historian RI more memorably called the Middle Ages a persecuting society and indeed there are unfortunately additional authorized groups some of whom are represented in our exhibit and in our book that we have not addressed in our lecture today not only women but the poor sexually non-conforming persons lepers the disabled the mentally ill dissidents and other others Moore's argument was not that the persecuting society he described was simply to be expected of the barbaric dark ages from which we have thankfully emerged such stereotypes of the Middle Ages create a comforting narrative that allows us to make an author of this era to consider medieval humans as absolutely different from us so that we can imagine we have progressed beyond the worst of human ignorant injustice and atrocities instead Moore argues that around the 12th century European socio-political institutions began to perfect rhetorical strategies that exaggerated conflated and created threats as a means of consolidating power they used such tactics to shape the emotions and identities of in groups through scapegoating and demonizing others it's not that such prejudice didn't exist before rather the rising state and church bureaucracy we're finding ways of organizing and weaponizing them to their advantage the very official 'no sub these monstrous messages appearing as they did in Bibles and heraldry and histories of the world is what made them so horrifyingly effective indeed monstrous artifacts of medieval hatreds persist in the public sphere today where they can still do damage from Moore's heads and civic context to the Juden saw to the way that neo-nazi marchers in Charlottesville adapted medieval symbols to project their own totalitarian fantasies of normative purity state sanction hatred in the post medieval period has led to the global slave trade the Holocaust the genocide of Native Americans and other contemporary atrocities essentially because the technologies of the modern era amplified the potential global scale of destructive persecuting societies it is imperative that we promptly and definitively condemn prejudice and hatred and that we demand that our leaders our media and our textbooks also do so in this year the 200th anniversary of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein it is appropriate to acknowledge how complicated our our monsters how they mean what they do and what they can teach us like our own society medieval societies were not monolithic and their monsters like our monsters are not univocal or predictable tonight we focused on monsters that alienate others but if you would like to hear more not only about the aliens but also the terrors and the wonders in the title of our exhibit we invite you to join our joint talk at the 92nd Street Y on June 19th or our gallery talk here at the Morrigan on June 29th monsters were put to many uses throughout the Middle Ages and were as often points of fascination and even as fun as of insult and exclusion and we explore such examples as well still in our historical moment in our era of persecuting societies it is important to look at the deep history of other and the central role monsters and the monstrous have played and continue to play in it [Applause] any questions for the speakers yes what did you learn from the exhibit I can't and there's we learned so much we learned we learned specifics about 60 morgen manuscripts and how they relate to each other yeah one of the so I've been working on monsters and the monstrous in one way or another for about 20 years and there's two things I would say one a sort of fun and positive which is that you know in my my day job I'm a professor in a university and you know I write books and articles and so on and there I pick whatever images I want and I illustrate them however I wish and I put whatever I want next to each other and one of the things I learned in the process of curating this is how much the real and physical and tangible nature of these manuscripts influences how we see them what we can show what we can put where and how and so that was a real different process for me the other thing though that became clear so we started working on this really about five years ago is the urgency of this material I to me anyway I feel like a lot of this work has a much sharper edge and a much greater urgency than it did when I started working on it 20 years ago that may be partly just my own awareness of issues but I think it may also be a change over time I think you did you point out a really a good thank you very much cuz I think you pointed out kind of a mistake be looking oh yes that we were asked that about the what seeming contradiction in our talk in which we said the word race was used for the first time in the 15th century with relationship to hunting dogs but that I had quoted an earlier text by Agustin and what I should have done and I thank you for pointing this out is go back to the original translation which the sisters we should always do and check that word which was mistranslated as so many words are so many times the word race creeps into these translations because they were translated in the 18th and 19th centuries when that was the word that scholars wanted to use because it was the culturally current concept of race at that time if I'm remembering correctly Augustine says gains there which is more of like a group a tribe none of the words work that well in essence but yeah he doesn't use so the when we when I say that race comes from this late medieval very very late medieval French context this is the word that gives us the modern word race there's also a contemporary more or less considering maybe slightly later a Spanish instance it rises there as well which gives rasa so this French and Spanish and Spanish terms give us that modern word race so yeah we should be very careful we really should have pulled that out and when we were gone back to the original yeah and and tried something else there maybe even just put in Genz in that place to say this is this word that we often now translate as race but didn't really mean quite the same thing thank you very much for that comment right behind you yes so the question was about the Sophists and so I attempt multiple answers to that so on the one hand you know that the term monster is not usually the category that medieval texts give us to group them they tend to refer to them under the rubric of wonder or Marvel and what I love about those terms and I'd argue that monster actually is a term like that we just don't think of it that way is that they're about our response to them you know something that's a marvel because you marvel at it if it evokes marveling and you it's a marvel the same with wonder right and I would say that a monster is something that evokes in you a kind of feeling of monstrosity so we often get in catalogues of monsters figures that are not overtly horrifying in any way the text called the wonders of the east gives us along with giant dog headed fire-breathing people eaters the kings who have many kings under them okay also the quote unquote generous men who are generous for giving women to passing strangers it's a different kind of horror but not an embodied kind they look just like the sort of interlocutor figure who's walking through this landscape there's no physio Naumann s-- or anything like that but you said how often are these monsters are marvelous people's sources of knowledge and I would say ultimately the answer to that is every single time because that is their basic function they exist to teach us something this is what a Gustin tells us Isidore of Seville another very important early medieval theologian says the same that they are there to demonstrate to us the powers of God that's explicitly what medieval authors and artists saw as their function now a philosopher might teach you in one way but a dog-headed fire-breathing home of adjectives something also but in a very different way yes well the question was about the depictions of Jewish women and if there are any sources or good examples of depictions of monsters Jewish one reason why there's not as many depictions of Jewish women is because one place where you really find a lot of representations of Jews and Christian medieval art is at in the crucifixion and that is at a subject that is repeated more than probably any other subject and it's the men who are shown torturing Christ not women as far as monster eyes Jewish women I think you're more likely to find Jewish women represented as temptresses as potential sexual temptations to Christian men and you even see that in some representations of the personification of synagogue a-- who sometimes gets shown a kind of sexy way and there's great work by a New York scholar Nina Rowe on that topic and I don't know if you wanted to add anything to that yeah just a couple of things one analogous to the representation of Jewish women or the representation of so-called Saracen women which is this kind of racialized idea of Muslims and again we'll see them in roles of a kind of exotic sized a broad a sized temptress figure often the quote-unquote Saracen princess I say quote/unquote this is a term of denigration you know so the the Saracen princess will be married to a question night and then will eventually convert and so on so we see those figures and also sometimes in apocalypse manuscripts the [ __ ] of Babylon is represented in garments that are meant to type her as an Eastern religious racial other perhaps unspecified between they're often discussed as perhaps having something to do with Islam but the the first medieval in Christian encounters with Islam declare it to be a Jewish heresy so there's a lot of blurring between those boundaries there was something else I was gonna say all right another reason that you might not find so often monster eyes Jewish women is that given the sort of prevailing masculinist medieval culture the monster the monstrous races are generally speaking male unless the monstrosity is explicitly gendered or sexual in nature and so when you work through all of those figures at the side of the map they're all most likely male and women go through catalogues of them like these wonders of the east manuscripts the mouth mouth mouth mouth mouth until you get to the bearded huntresses and the whole point there is that they're an inversion of typical medieval European expectations because women aren't the hunters men are the hunters women aren't bearded men are bearded and also of course instead of hunting with hunting dogs they hunt with cats because cats are somehow the opposite of dogs right and so when we see just the similar to when we see hell scenes in hell the sins are often represented specifically so there is greed now and there's anger now and there is going e-mail and there is slaw now and there is lust female so when we see female figures they are often there in this again masculinist misogynists see that a lot of these images come out of their expressly for that one purpose not simply generically present the default representation in monsters is almost though it's going to be now somebody were over here raise their hand quickly there's the front row so the question was about the depictions of women in the exhibition itself which rather than showing depictions of Jewish or saris of women actually shows more often depictions of European women yes no it's absolutely true that most representations are negative representations of women are in the Christian tradition are of Christian women they and usually starting out with Eve the original femme fatale and sometimes Eve Eve's features even get sort of grafted on to the snake who is Satan and then the weaknesses that the putative weaknesses of women get represented in medieval art in various ways including some of the monsters that we have in the showing such as the siren who's you know tempting body and song is means death to the courtiers who are lured in by her or the Sphinx that you alluded to where she tries she has just she's just too smart for her own good and that leads to her demise at the hands of a Christian hero Knight so we don't see that many representations of as many representations of Jewish and Saracen women not that they don't exist and they are kind of all treated similarly and with sort of similar weaknesses it seems as Sarah Lipton has argued but the fact that they were women was more important than other aspects of their identities in terms of these ideological moralizing context in which they appear in the imagery a couple of things to add to that first off again thinking of the kind of general misogyny period women were often viewed as not being able to seriously engage with the religious you know philosophical elements of the religion and therefore their religious practice was often taken as somewhat less serious than male religious belief practice philosophy and so on but another thing just to kind of bring the the notions back around so we're talking about women in these images as appearing Christian we should bear in mind that what we're actually saying is they appear European because Christians by the 12th century are in Africa they are in Asia right Christianity has spread quite a ways at this point and so there is a very common move in the Middle Ages to racialize religion which we see very much sort of encapsulations of this as Shari alluded to this in the talk in these medieval texts that our conversion narratives where a Saracen in in the text that Shari quoted from which is the curse or Mundi a Middle English text the Saracens are blennies they're headless people who were described as being black and blue as led and they get converted by King David who is a Christian in this story but when they are converted it says they became as white as milk and all their shape was made anew so we presumed their heads regrow and he says at that point they had the color of high blood which is the racialization of class so again all of these things are implicated they all overlap gender race religion and class are all in the Middle Ages in a very fluid interaction which is one of the very important elements to bear in mind when we try and grapple with what it means to characterize both the fantastic creatures and beings and peoples that we talked about as well as when we try and grapple with medieval texts and images talking about real and known other groups in the period so for those of you didn't get to ask your question Sheree and ASA have kindly agreed to take a few more questions individually outside the lecture hall but for now please join me [Applause]

Channel: The Morgan Library & Museum

Views: 42,124

Keywords: The Morgan, The Morgan Library & Museum, Medieval Art, Medieval

Id: XOk43No02Es

Length: 75min 27sec (4527 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 21 2018