Anyone interested in medieval monsters--a not small crowd, judging from my sense of undergraduate teaching trends--should thrill at this new edition and translation (into modern French) of a moralized adaptation of Thomas of Cantimpré’s chapter on “The Monstrous Humans of the East” from his encyclopedia, De Naturis Rerum. The work survives in a single manuscript, BnF fr. 15106, edited once before, in 1933, in a thin and scarcely ever cited volume by Alfons Hilka. Hilka did little to distinguish the French work from its laconic Latin source. But the French adaptation material is anything but laconic: its moralization and commentary, as well as its thickets of poetic wordplay and active engagement with its illustrations, justifies recognizing it as an “une veritable creation littéraire” (8) in its own right.
The poem’s 1813 lines cover 42 monsters, ranging from familiar Plinian people like cynocephali, Amazons, and pygmies to the more obscure (like dog-toothed, river-dwelling women), to people that we might only dubiously recognize as “monstrous,” like Mongols, those with various physical disabilities, bearded women, and several sets of Eastern ascetics. Dittmar and Pérez-Simon surround all this with ample notes and a massive introduction on matters codicological, historical, linguistic, iconographic, and literary.
Dittmar and Pérez-Simon might have drawn the title of their edition from the poem’s last line, “ici finent Li monstre d’Orient en Inde,” that is, The Monsters of the East and India. They elect instead to draw it from roughly the poem’s middle, where it names its own source (“dans le livre des Mostres des homes”), an odd phrase repeated from the poem’s rubricated incipit: as Dittmar and Pérez-Simon observe, the phrase’s crabbed syntax (could it be done perhaps as The Monsters of Men? Human Monsters?) suggests the very monstrosity of the work’s subject.
It traveled originally with Aldobrandino of Siena’s Régime du corps, Guillaume the Clerk’s Bestiary, possibly Gossouin of Metz’s Image du Monde, and one narrative work, an abridgment of the massiveChevalerie de Judas Macabé et de ses nobles freres. This latter work was dedicated to a member of the Dampnierre family, while Les Monstres des hommes praises a Lady of Enghien. The surprising pairing of a Dampnierre with their long-time enemies, the Enghiens, allows Dittmar and Pérez-Simon to propose an occasion for the work’s production: a wedding in 1287 that sought to reconcile the two families by uniting Yolande de Dampierre (also known as Yolande of Flanders) to Gautier d’Enghien, son of Marie de Réthel, whom they identify as the work’s very Dame d’Enghien. The manuscript in its original form would have therefore comprised natural and biblical history, stories of martial valor, guides to bodily health, diverting material on wonders and oddities, and amid all this, moral instruction, perhaps with the hope that the newly married couple would carry on the public acts of charity and devotion to the religious orders for which Marie was well-known.
The adaptation never acknowledges Thomas of Cantimpré directly. It does name some of his sources, Jerome, Aldhelm of Malmesbury (here called Adelin, long supposed to have authored a Latin work on the monsters of the east), and Jacques de Vitry. It also references the trickster fox Reynard, some fables, a satiric poem (“Vilain n’en guste”), as well as a certain “Reclus de Molliens,” whose Roman de Carité and Roman de Miserere share this work’s attacks on moral lassitude, greed, and hypocrisy. There are no references whatsoever to the cutting-edge philosophical concerns of scholasticism, nor any to many other common concerns in thirteenth-century Northern European Christianity: the promotion of antisemitism, piety for the eucharist and the Virgin Mary, or the championing of the crusades. It straddles, as the editors say, clerical and court culture, and has a strong character of a work meant either for preaching or individual instruction from a spiritual advisor, meant to delight visually and poetically but not to present much of an intellectual challenge.
Although the work’s prologue declares that people “here” are attractive and noble, and that the people of the East are entirely different, the divisions collapse as soon as text gets into its paired descriptions and moralizations. Resemblances multiply with every entry. Some are straightforward: the short-lived giants show us that no matter how powerful we think we are, death might strike us at any moment, and the Brahmans, the ascetic philosophers who legendarily debate Alexander the Great, should shame us into living more virtuously. Many, though, are occasions for the work to weave analogies of dizzying unpredictability: sciapods, who shelter themselves from the rain and wind with their one giant foot, are like recluses driven mad by their solitude; those with horns and a tail offer an opportunity to critique those who heretically believe Antichrist has already arrived (Joachimites, as Dittmar and Pérez-Simon suggest); those with hands and feet reversed, with 8 toes on each foot, symbolize either those who steal from each other without honor, or those who stand securely in virtue. And a few analogies run into utter confusion, like that for the hairy men and women: God makes nothing in vain, we are told, so if God had made us hairy, then we should praise him anyway, as we would, anyway, since David (Psalms 150:6) tells us that all spirits praise God--so let us do that, and be wise (“Et nous le façons, se sons sage”). What lesson anyone is meant to draw from this is anyone’s guess.
Some “monsters” are scarcely monstrous. We are told of Alpine people with goiters, chiefly women: a pun based on the resemblances between the French for throat (gorge), those with goiters (les gorgières), and the verb gorgoier (to mock or rail against), here nominalized as “les gorgiienes,” allows it to condemn, in a familiarly misogynist vein, women’s excessive speech and love of rumors. Not long after it speaks of theInfirmes, people who are deaf, mute, blind, leprous, or paralyzed, who variously and unpredictably birth other kinds of infirm people, a lesson to the beautiful woman who might be reading this to remember that we all issue from one parent.
Its entry on the on the cyncocephali, bipeds with canine heads, uses their barking to build a condemnation of slander. The poetic effects merit exact quotation, which I offer here as a not untypical example of the difficulties Dittmar and Pérez-Simon overcame in their translation, and the bizarreriesthat no doubt inspired them to take on this project:
Se mesdires ne fust mesdis,
jamais dis ne fust demesdis;
mais mesdire si mesdisoit
en mesdisant quand mesdisoit.
De mesdire si com mesdisent
mesdiront si mesdisent. (509-516)
The semantic saturation of medire (to slander) collapses sense into pure sound, much like the barking that either allows or frustrates cynocephalic communication. The work achieves similar effects elsewhere, as in its commentary on six-handed people, by twisting its praise of giving (donner) with the pardon offered by God to the generous almsgiver, and an entry on the Mongols that again condemns slander by punning on medire and “mes dires” (my words or ideas), but nowhere else do the poetry, (non)sense, commentary, and monster fit so perfectly.
By far its longest entry, and most sustained moral commentary, concerns the monsters who eat people raw. Gluttony is its target. Here we find a long list of wines that people should definitely not enjoy, a direct address to the poor to invite them to the table of the rich, and, especially, a condemnation of the lords who metaphorically dine on their flesh of their peasants while orphans die of hunger. It would be no surprise, cries the moralist, if someone were to poison you!
Here and elsewhere the moral condemnation reinforces those common to its era: it is angry at the greedy and powerful, outraged by heretics, disgusted by the corruption of Rome, and fed up with the garrulousness of women. Amid all this, it mingles praise for moderation, piety, and almsgiving. Dittmar and Pérez-Simon take these critiques as transgressive, subversive, and otherwise unheard of (inouïe) in the thirteenth century. I understand the desire to champion this work by presenting it as a voice crying in a wilderness of feudal cruelty. However, as Philippe Buc demonstrated some thirty years ago in a chapter on metaphors and eating, twelfth- and thirteenth-century moralists resorted often to images of anthropophagy to condemn how magnates crushed their subjects in their judicial and administrative machinery: as Buc points out, Jacques de Vitry himself was among these moralists, devoting the third chapter of his Historia Orientalis to a scorching attack on the depredations of the powerful against the weak. [1] Surely the author of Les Monstres des hommes knew this text. We might recall, even, how fables routinely characterized magnates as wolves devouring the flesh of innocent sheep. We might question the effectiveness of these not uncommon condemnations--in the absence of modern programs of redistributive taxation, cruelty continued, relieved occasionally with spots of charity or decency--but if we were among the little people, we might still have heard them with some gratitude.
The attractions of this volume for anyone working on monsters could not be more obvious. It offers much material additionally to those working on gender, queerness, disability, and posthumanism, a panoply of hot-button issues in medieval cultural studies. I’m delighted by it and hope it receives far more attention than did Hilka’s neglected edition.
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Note:
1. Philippe Buc, “Manducation et domination: Analyse du Métaphore,” L’Ambiguïté du livre. Prince, pouvoir, et peuple dans les commentaires de la bible au moyen âge (Beauchesne, 1994), 206-31.