Maps and Monsters in Medieval England

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 marshaled 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.