Maps and Monsters in Medieval England

Revised and Expanded Twentieth-Anniversary Edition
2. Auflage 2026
ISBN: 978-1-032-44586-1
Verlag: Taylor & Francis Ltd

Buch, Englisch, 316 Seiten, Format (B × H): 156 mm x 234 mm

This book’s central thesis is that notions of monstrosity and geographic marginality were central to the formation of an English identity in the Middle Ages. Medieval Christian theologians believed that geography was divinely ordered, so their perception of Britain as being in the monstrous periphery of the world caused anxiety among its inhabitants that we can see expressed across media and genres.

Medieval cartography, for centuries scorned as crude, is now the subject of numerous careful studies; monsters, likewise long ignored in scholarship, are now of great interest. This book sits at the crossroads of these two discourses (critical cartography and monster studies), treated separately in most scholarship. Nearly twenty years after its initial publication, Maps and Monsters in Medieval England remains the only extended study of the role of monsters on medieval maps, and of the ways that ideas about geography shaped the role of monsters in other contexts, where they were marshalled as part of an ongoing effort to define what it meant to be human, English, and Christian.

This volume is intended for professional scholars, graduate students, and advanced undergraduates. Translations are provided for all Latin and Old English texts to render the volume accessible to a wider range of readers.

Zielgruppe

Academic and Postgraduate

Autoren/Hrsg.

Mittman, Asa Simon

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Alte Geschichte & Archäologie Mittelalterliche, neuzeitliche Archäologie (Europa)
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Europäische Geschichte

Inhaltsverzeichnis

List of Figures

Preface to the Revised and Expanded Twentieth-Anniversary Edition

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Medieval English Manuscripts, Maps, and Monsters: A User’s Guide

Part One: Mapping the Outer Edges of the World

Chapter One: Mythical Origins

Chapter Two: Mapping Identity

Chapter Three: The Monsters on the Edge

Chapter Four: Mapping the Jewish “Monster”

Part Two: The Wonders/Marvels of the East over Three Centuries and a Millennium

Chapter Five: Monsters, Race, and the “Monstrous Races”

Chapter Six: The Reality and Persistence of Monsters

Chapter Seven: Containment and Consumption

Chapter Eight: Monstrous Sin and Salvation

Part Three: Lexical Spaces as Battlegrounds

Chapter Nine: Monstrous Nature

Chapter Ten: The Monster Within

Chapter Eleven: Saints in the Margins

Conclusion

Dwelling in the Monster

Notes

Works Cited

Index

Über Autor(innen)

Asa Simon Mittman (Professor of Art & Art History, California State University, Chico) has been studying demonizing images and their impacts for 25 years. He is author of Cartographies of Exclusion: Anti-Semitic Mapping in Medieval England (2024) and Maps and Monsters in Medieval England (2006, second edition 2026), co-author of Inconceivable Beasts: The Wonders of the East in the Beowulf Manuscript (2013), and co-curator of Medieval Monsters: Terrors, Aliens, Wonders at The Pierpont Morgan Library & Museum (2018). He has published fifty articles and chapters, edited five volumes, and delivered dozens of invited lectures and conference talks on these subjects.