Living at the edge of the world: Marginality and monstrosity in Anglo -Saxon manuscripts and beyond

Anglo-Saxon England was a deeply multi-cultural society, with its members drawn from the Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Britons and Romans, Celtics and Galls. In order to provide some measure of national unity to this ethnic and cultural multiplicity, illuminators and authors cast their gazes outward to more disparate "Others," both near and far. In texts and images, they depicted the Vikings, Danes, Scots and Picts as monstrous, bestial men and the more remote inhabitants of Africa and Asia as literal monsters, including the dog-headed, fire-breathing cynocephali, the one-footed sciopods and the fascinating headless, mindless, possibly soulless blemmyes, who seem to exist as an embodiment of man's basest desires. These creatures, along with a fantastic host of dragons, ogres and elves, populated the Anglo-Saxon world with a very real presence. These chapters contain visual and textual evidence of a world view in which the Anglo-Saxons viewed England as geographically peripheral and therefore a potent site for potential salvation. Chapter 1 covers the composition of world maps, reconceptualizing their structure as radial rather than linear, with the British Isles located in a marginal, monster-filled band that demarcates the boundaries of the inhabitable world. Chapter 2 examines a selection of these monsters as they appear on the mappaemundi and in The Marvels of the East, a trio of manuscripts devoted to their cataloging and classification. They are composed of consciously constructed hybrid bodies which, by contrast, render the bodies of their viewers as stable and normal. Chapter 3 is a study of Gerald of Wales' Topography of Ireland. This later text incorporates all of the themes present in the various earlier works, redefining and shifting the perception of England. Chapter 4 covers inhabited initial letters, which are often composed of monstrous, human, animal and plant elements in free association with one another. Through these images, the illuminators established a violently animate world in which orders of life continually merge and blend, at once lending concrete physicality to the monsters and tempestuous animation to the trees and vines of the English forests and fens which lay, dark and brooding, just outside monastery and town walls.*.;*This dissertation is multimedia (contains text and other applications not available in printed format).