2007 Congress<\/a><\/p>\nThe brutal cynocephali<\/em>, a fearsome Eastern race of dog-headed hybrids, are variously described in extant manuscripts as fire-breathing, lantern-eyed, be-tusked cannibals.\u00a0\u00a0It is little known that St. Christopher, the popular patron saint of travellers, was himself a ferocious cynocephalus.\u00a0\u00a0After converting and receiving baptism he was captured whilst preaching to the heathens by King Dagnus of Samos, who subsequently tortured and ultimately martyred the now-gentle giant.<\/p>\nIn my paper, I explore the correlation unearthed by Michel Foucault between monstrous beings and monstrous practices during the medieval period.\u00a0\u00a0Foucault’s “archaeological” methodology, treating documents as discursive monuments, reveals an underlying relation between the monster’s mixed nature and the exercise of disciplinary power.\u00a0\u00a0The monster’s very existence violates both natural and social law, requiring the exercise of spectacularly excessive sovereign retribution.\u00a0\u00a0It comes as no surprise that King Dagnus practiced the most extreme, ritual torture on the hybrid body of St. Christopher.<\/p>\n
Two queries arise, however, when we examine the detail of Foucault’s archaeological analysis.\u00a0\u00a0First, corporeal mixture is by no means the only form of monstrosity mentioned in the many lists and accounts of medieval monsters.\u00a0\u00a0Isidore of Seville’s infamous taxonomy recounts a meticulous and varied schema of portentous aberrations, irregularities, and transformations.\u00a0\u00a0Second, drawing on the work of Aristotle and Varro, Isidore explicitly argues that monstrous births and races are not contra naturam<\/em>, but rather manifestations of divine will.\u00a0\u00a0As such, these prodigies are contrary only to known<\/em> nature.<\/p>\nMy paper thus explores the lacuna and the contradiction that seem to arise when Foucault’s archaeology meets Isidore’s taxonomy, providing a monstrous but enlightening mixture of archaeology and teratology.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Tom Tyler (Oxford Brookes University, Oxford, United Kingdom) “Monstrous Mixture: \u00a0The Archaeology of Teratology” Abstract of Paper Presented at the 42nd International Congress on Medieval Studies (Kalamazoo, 2007) Session on “Getting Medieval: \u00a0Medieval Monstrosities and Their Ill Repute” Sponsored by the Research Group on Manuscript Evidence Organized by Jennifer A. T. Smith 2007 Congress The […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"parent":1023,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","template":"","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/manuscriptevidence.org\/wpme\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/3903"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/manuscriptevidence.org\/wpme\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/manuscriptevidence.org\/wpme\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/manuscriptevidence.org\/wpme\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/manuscriptevidence.org\/wpme\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3903"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/manuscriptevidence.org\/wpme\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/3903\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3904,"href":"https:\/\/manuscriptevidence.org\/wpme\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/3903\/revisions\/3904"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/manuscriptevidence.org\/wpme\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1023"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/manuscriptevidence.org\/wpme\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3903"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}