“During the Middle Ages the edges of the known world were at the same time the limits of representation.” - Michael Camille, ‘The Image on the Edge’
Looking at Medieval visual culture, a pattern emerges. Maps, manuscripts, church buildings all highlight this distinction between the centre and the boarders. This distinction is one that is visual, as well as metaphorical, portraying a moral difference, but also one of knowledge. What is unknown and bad is pushed to edges, away from a sacred centre.
Here, gaps in knowledge were filled in by the Christian imagination. This took a moral turn. Today we unpack this and how it has impacted contemporary society.
Physical representations
Let’s start with the Medieval town. At the centre we have a public square, then residences, which is separated by a wall from the outside world. Safety lies in the centre, as opposed to the danger external to the town, with bandits and enemies. People are kept in by this fear of the outside world, and, by extension, how they too will become this ‘other’ by being sentenced to outside the community’s walls.
We can see this division on a smaller scale within the confines of the town itself, with the church. Churches are seen as sacred centres as opposed to the temptations outside its walls, making it a physical division representative of the abstract. These walls visually themselves enforce this narrative, with the gargoyles and ugly demons carved in to these external walls, especially around the entrances. They represent a choice given to the viewer: either go inside to God or remain outside with the devil.
Other visual culture of the church further represents this, like with the wild marginalia bordering the sanctity of the central religious text. Either illustrating the text so as to enforce its message of engaging with wider religious themes, these illuminations were always moral warnings to the reader, depicting the sinful or the perverse (usually in the form of giant snails.)
This is, however, echoed in what we would consider to be a more secular subject like that of maps.
Here we can see what we saw in town plans with that which is known and safe is separated from the unknown and what is deemed as morally dubious. The religious imagination projected its fears onto these distant lands making them spaces of moral conflict, where the fears were made real, yet distant enough to not provoke hysteria. Thus the unknown areas of the world were pushed to the edges of these maps, where they were filled with these manifestations of sin: sea monsters and humanoid creatures.
Rather than being shaped by geography, these maps catered to the Christian imagination, seeing the world through an understanding of heaven and hell, good and evil, known and unknown. It was this unknown that began “just over the hill” (as Camille says) and ended on the edge of the world.
Furthermore, the Bible directly influenced later maps, with Jerusalem being at the centre of the world being placed at this point on the map, once again presenting this pattern of the sacred centre separated from the chaotic, sinful boarder. This, in turn presents how religion shaped understandings of the world, through these dichotomies of known/ unknown, moral/ immoral.
Creation of Identity
How they saw the rest of the world dictated how they saw themselves, with this other being their opposite and a manifestations of their fears. Religion played a central role in the creation of their identity with these opposing forces drawn under the moral guidance of Christianity, as we have seen in the examples of maps and marginalia.
Directed by this self-awareness, Medieval Europe was able to create some loose form of identity, as they saw themselves and others through these moral and spiritual differences, which influenced perceptions of geography (and, as we will discuss a little later, race). Despite looking down on this period of history, those of the Renaissance drew from this prior attempt in their own shaping of identity.
On a larger scale, therefore, we can see how their self-awareness has shaped our own understanding of them, with Medieval Europe as centered around their Christian beliefs, creating this divided period, even if their was a large amount of travel, migration and trade. Their beliefs still influence our ideas of them in this way.
Physical appearance and differentiation
Furthermore, these differences- both geographical and moral- were reflected in the appearance of the people and creatures that lived in these distant lands. Whilst they were previously depicted on the edges of maps and in marginalia, they begun the become to centre of interest over the course of the Medieval period, in part due to the popularity of Marco Polo ‘Book of the Marvels of the World.’
Marco Polo was from a merchant family, which is, presumably, what allowed him to travel outside of his homeland of Italy to South Eastern Europe and the land beyond of Asia. It is this trip that he reported back to his European readers via his book, which was illustrated with the monstrous races he said he saw there.
There’s a significant lack of credibility in this, especially with the whole seeing monsters, but also his lack of mention of the cultures of the places he visited which were completely different to that of his homeland.
The mosnters themselves appear to be a mixture of Roman myth and local folklore, presented to the unsuspicious audience in the form of sights he has both seen or heard mentioned by the locals.
These monsters fitted perfectly in with the chivalric narratives of early Medieval Europe: the European hero, a perfect Christian, venturing to this distant land to find these evil creatures, to which, by killing them, represented both his and Christianity’s conquering of distant lands.
They gave reason to why Christianity was both morally superior and why it should be introduced to other places. Theories of these monsters’ existence included that they were people whose sinfulness warped their physical appearance, meanwhile others believed that they were the descendants of Ham, Noah’s cursed son who inherited Africa- hence these monsters’ placement in this unexplored continent.
They offered a warning against the European Christian that their appearance would be the evidence of their sin, making them this other. They too would be banished to these distant lands. Once again it can be seen that these others embodied contemporary fears.
And so these creatures become the central focus of increasingly secularised manuscripts. Of course, they retained their religious theme of morality, but these illuminations stressed their appearance, so as to shock. They were, metaphorically and literally, the centre of these manuscripts: a commodity: the Medieval literary freak show.
Changing views on this period
Our understanding of this subject and this time period has changed greatly over the years, specifically according to changing views of morality and difference. The Victorian ages, for example, can be seen as a time of evangelism, with strict social and religious expectations. The wild marginalia was seen as a mere irrelevant, distraction from the sanctity of the text, as seen in Thompson’s argument that “the ornamentation of a manuscript must have been regarded as a work having no connection whatever with the character of the book itself.”
Alternatively, the Medieval view that the world outside Christian Europe was plagued by immorality and violence was an excuse used to justify the period of colonisation that followed the Medieval period. Cultural, biological and moral superiority were used as an excuse for the colonisation, enforcing Christianity and slavery.
As Camille says, “Renaissance thinkers pretended that they no longer required this space of ‘otherness,’ unless it be the new edges of the World being discovered by Columbus.” The more Europe discovered the world, the more it sought to make it like itself. As justification of their violence, they drew of these ideas of these immoral others, who took the place of the monster in a chivalric narrative where the far superior Christian took the role of hero.
Now
From the birth of these ideas of the distant immoral lands and their monstrous inhabitants, came the racist stereotypes and xenophobic attitudes that plague our world today. These lands are still spaces on which fears can be displaced via propaganda and the people are scapegoated, meaning they are seen as manifestations of contemporary fears.
But understanding these origins and how they have impacted contemporary society, there’s hope to overcome them, which is what this Arboretum of Notes is all about.
Questions to consider
What are our modern day monsters?
To what extent do these divisions between morally good and bad exist today’s more secular society?
Do you know any less Eurocentric examples?
Read more
Currently reading: The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera
Random Recommendation: The soundtrack of ‘Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence’ by Ryuichi Sakamoto
This was an amazing read