Content area
Full Text
Michael E. Heyes, ed. Holy Monsters, Sacred Grotesques: Monstrosity and Religion in Europe and the United States. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2018. 296 pp. Hardcover. ISBN 978-1-4985-5076-5. $115.
As editor Michael E. Heyes notes in his "Introduction: Ecce Monstra," the study of monsters was popular during the Middle Ages, but until fairly recently was not a fertile area of research. And even the contemporary study of monsters has tended to look back historically in its analysis, toward the Middle Ages and classical antiquity with explorations of topics such as monstrous races and hybrid creatures. Moreover, very few scholarly studies focus on the presence of monsters in religion. Holy Monsters, Sacred Grotesques seeks to remedy these "empty spaces in scholarship" by analyzing monsters not only in connection with past history, but also in regard to "the modern intersection of religion and monsters" (xi, x).
This volume explores the subject matter in two parts of five chapters each, arranged chronologically, moving from the Middle Ages to contemporary popular culture. Part 1, "Inside the Monster, Looking Out," begins with Minji Lee's chapter "The Woman's Body, In-Between: The Holy and Monstrous Womb in Medieval Medicine and Religion." Lee's analysis draws upon Dana Oswald's criteria of monsters to explore women as "'in-between' monsters of the medieval world: positioned between men and animals, spiritual and physical" (3). Lee explores Oswald's criteria by focusing on two medieval texts, pseudo-Albert's De secretis mulierum and Hildegard of Bingen's Scivias. The misogynistic De secretis mulierum sees female reproductive organs and processes as making women inferior and possible poisonous to men, whereas Scivias views monstrous elements of the feminine body as crucial to salvation. Lee concludes by noting, "Both authors' depictions of monstrosity are not far from contemporary discourses on the female body," citing, for example, former US representative Todd Akin's 2017 claim that a woman's womb had the magical power to repel semen when raped (16).
Chapter 2, Thomas S. Franke's "Miracles and Monsters: Gog and Magog, Alexander the Great, and the Antichrist in the Apocalypse of the Catalan Atlas (1375)," discusses a world map made by Abraham Cresques for Pedro IV king of Aragon, as a gift for Charles le Sage, the king of France. Differing significantly from the usual mappa mundi, Cresques's atlas...
