A properly empirical curiosity about the outer world coexists with a bookish pleasure in the far-fetched and implausibility for its own sake: the monster disturbs.
49 Diverse Species of Monsters from Distant Lands In: Thomas of Cantimpré, Liber de naturis rerum creatarum, Ghent, 1492, fol. 1v–2 Patron: Raphael de Mercatellis Manuscript on parchment, 280 fols., 409 x 295 mm Ghent, Sint-Baafskathedraal, inv. Ms. 15
BIBLIOGR APHY
Wittkower 1942: 159–160; Versyp 1950: 32–33; Cantimpratensis 1973: 98–99; Smets 1974; Derolez 1979: 168–175; Derolez, De Kok & De Schryver 1984: 281–282, no. 166; Arnould 1991: 21, 185–186; Massing 1991b: 125, no. 6; Jackson 2006: 101, fig. 6.2.
This lavish compendium of medieval knowledge of the natural world was produced for Raphael de Marcatellis (1437–1508), abbot of St Bavo and a tireless bibliophile.1 It is mostly derived from the Liber de natura rerum of Thomas of Cantimpré (1201–1275),2 a testimony to the strong fascination that scholastic encyclopaedism could still exert on an erudite mind at the dawn of the modern era. Cantimpré’s formidable work, in keeping with the much older encyclopaedic tradition of Isidore of Seville and Hrabanus Maurus, included as part of its sweeping panorama of created species an account of the marvellous peoples of Africa and Asia.3 The repertoire rallies the familiar figures of the Cyclops, the headless Blemmie, the dogheaded Cynocephalus and the crane-fighting Pygmy; the Sciopod is here shown resting in the shade of his huge foot, while a mouthless man feeds off the scent of an apple. Some specimens are rendered wondrous on account of their behaviour, like the Amazons or the Indian tribes of the Gymnosophists and the Bragmanes
1 For biographical notes, see Van Acker 1960 and Massing 1991b: 125. On this theme see, among others: Davies 2016. 2 Cantimpratensis 1973. The volume includes also a selection of texts of historical interest, ranging from the byzantine historian Jordanes’ De origine actibusque Getarum to the more contemporary John of Thurocz’s Chronicle and Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini’s Historia Bohemica (Massing 1991b: 125). 3 The text given here corresponds to Cantimpratensis 1973: 98–99. 4 For a catalogue of monstrous races of the classical and medieval legendaries, including those shown here, see Friedman 1981: 9–21. 5 For an overview of Greek sources of the legendary of monstrous races and their transmission, see Wittkower 1942: 159–160. 6 On which see overview in Orchard 1997: 116–139, and translation of the Latin and Old English texts: 204–253. 7 On the Epistle of Fermes, alternatively Farasmanes, Feramen, Premo or Parmoenis, see James 1929: 1–59 and Gibb 1977: 15–30. 8 Most notably, the remarkable Wonders of the East manuscripts in England, on which see Gibb 1977: esp. pp. 28–29 and Friedman 1986; the three extant manuscripts are reproduced in James 1929.
(derived from old travellers’ accounts of the Brahmin caste).4 These races enjoyed a venerable pedigree, for the most part traceable to Greek periploi like those of Ctesias, Megasthenes and the Pseudo-Scylax – whose descriptions reached the Middle Ages through the compilations of Pliny and Solinus.5 The long tradition associated with the Alexander saga provided another rich hunting-ground for the prodigious, while pseudo-epistolary concoctions like the Letter of Alexander to Aristotle,6 or the purported exchanges between Hadrian and an Eastern king about the wonders of Asia,7 afforded a pretext for distilling narrative sources into tantalizing lists of mirabilia – some of which would blossom into finely-illustrated catalogues by the turn of the first millennium.8 The enthusiasm with which this material was consumed and circulated, spanning a variety of media and genres, yields precious glimpses into the inner workings of the medieval mind. Within the intellectual and imaginative modes proper to the fruition of these fantastical accounts, natural history walks hand in hand with antiquarianism, science with literature, experience with authority. A properly empirical curiosity about the outer world coexists with a bookish pleasure in the far-fetched and implausibility for its own sake: the monster disturbs and delights not because he is radically different, but because he is at once other and same, and so arrestingly ambiguous. When re-presented on the page, the spectacle of his contradictions is expressed as a cacophonous combination of familiar forms
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– unsatisfying analogies that draw us back to his indescribability. Such tensions remind us of these exercises’ indebtedness to another ancient tradition, that of paradoxography, and to a dimension of formal and conceptual play extending far beyond the positive categories of true and false. The earth’s manifold monstrosities are not, in this sense, mere reference points around the edges of the mappa mundi (cat. 50) or guardians of some external and unreachable frontier – they are pretexts for introspection and self-discovery, points where knowledge becomes reflexive and is made to meditate on its own limits. M AC
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50 Michael Wolgemut and Wilhelm Pleydenwurff Mappa Mundi and Strange Monsters from Distant Lands Paper, coloured woodcut In: Hartmann Schedel, Liber chronicarum, Nuremberg, published by Anton Koberger, 1493, fol. 12v–13 Private collection
BIBLIOGR APHY
Brown 1952: no. 44, pl. XII; Rucker 1973; Wilson 1976; Husband 1980: no. 4; Shirley 1984: 18–19, no. 19; Schoch 1986: 97; Campbell 1987; Woodward 1987: pl. 16; Massing 1991c: 124, no. 5; Puhlhorn & Laub 1993: 661–662, no. 2.18; Vogel 1994: 73–97; Landau & Parshall 1994; Fussel 1994: 7–30; Mund-Dopchie 1994: 25–26, 34; Bartrum 1995; Zahn 1996: 230–248; Padmos & Vanpaemel 2000: no. 105, 201–202; Reske 2000; Fussel 2001 (with exhaustive bibliography); Werfel 2001: 3; Dackerman 2002: 102–104, no. 7, Schneider 2004: 33 fig. 19, 126–127 fig. 73, Clobus & Hebert 2009: 35–56; Leitch 2009: 144; Silver 2010: 220; Helman 2013: 40–41.
The Nuremberg world-chronicle, elaborated by the humanist Hartmann Schedel (1440–1514), is conceived as a vast panorama of space and time, spanning the proverbial seven ages of the world as well as the full surface of the mappa mundi.1 This monumental digest is illustrated with 1804 woodcuts from the workshop of Michael Wolgemut, which effectively turn it into a diorama of natural and human history. While in every technical sense a fruit of its own age, its contents are in many respects traditional, looking back to the legacy of the great medieval encyclopaedias. Its conception of time, which provides the framework for its sweeping views of geographical space, relies on the scheme devised by Isidore in his Etymologies, in the seventh century; the world map on these pages, with its adjacent gallery of marvellous men from far-away lands, finds its place within an account of the Flood in the Book of Genesis,2 an event marking the dawn of the earth’s second age. The graphic composition here is important in ordering this body of knowledge, inserting it into
1 On this topic, see inter alia Friedman 1981: 37–58; Davies 2016. 2 Namely, Gen. 9: 22–27. 3 Gen. 9:25; an expressive commentary on this passage is provided by the anonymous author of a Middle Irish treatise on the Six Ages of the world (Oxford Bodleian Library Rawlinson Ms. 502b): ‘His famous father cursed the son called Ham so that he – he excelled in perversity – is the Cain of the people after the Flood. From him with valour sprung horse-heads and giants, the line of maritime leprechauns, and every unshapely person; those of the two heads […] and the two bodies in union, the dun-coloured, one-footed folk, the merry blue-beaked people […]’ (cited in Friedman 1981: 99). 4 On Cain’s and Ham’s association with the legendary of monstrous races, see Friedman 1981: 87–107; on Cain’s curse and the history of its representations see Mellinkoff 1981. 5 Massing 1991c: 124. 6 Jacobsson 2002: 6. II. 29–30 (66–68).
its traditional biblical context. The figures of Japheth, Shem and Ham correlate geographical knowledge with chronological time, rooting an understanding of space in the historic moment when the continents were divided among Noah’s sons (cf. cat. 42) – but they insert it also in the broader timeline of salvation history, and thus in the teleological framework proper to Christian accounts of the created world. The progeny of the reprobate Ham, cursed because he did not avert his eyes from his father’s nakedness, was scattered across the wild and wonderful lands of Africa and Asia.3 A second Cain, he becomes the patriarch of a degenerate humanity, represented by the fantastical peoples of the classical and medieval legendary.4 They are illustrated here according to longstanding iconographic types: a six-armed man, a feral woman, a man with six fingers on each hand, a satyr, a hermaphrodite, a man with four eyes and a Ciconian (a member of the eponymous people from classical lore, often imagined literally as a bird-men). Wolgemut’s reliance on older models is betrayed by these pictures’ close resonance with those in the Mercatellis compendium (cat. 49) and in the related Bruges, Stadsbibliotheek Ms. 411.5
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To interrogate the humanity of these fantastical beings, to assess their place within categories of sameness and difference, is also to seek their place in this divine scheme. Framed by these troubled genealogies, the mappa mundi becomes the object of a special understanding of the created world, one that is also axiological and whose overarching harmony does not preclude disquieting dissonances. In this, it reverberates with another longstanding idea, issued from Augustinian aesthetics: God’s creation is rendered beautiful on account of an interplay of luminous and dark elements – a chiaroscuro lost on the mortal eye, which can only be captured by the vast, scanning gaze of the first maker.6 This integrated vision of the varied individual threads that make the tapestry of nature is in some sense akin to the great visual artifice that the map, as a picture, represents: an inconceivable whole assembled out of endless conflicting parts. M AC
[cat. 50] fol. 12r
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