The "blemmye" monster from The Wonders of the East

Masters and Monsters: How a Book Was Born

Asa Mittman, Art and Art History, was studying medieval art history at Stanford, casting about for a dissertation topic, when he had one of those legendary aha! experiences.

“It was one of those eureka moments that we always tell our students do not actually occur in scholarship—until it happens to you,” he said, laughing. And perhaps this is fitting, as it launched him into a study of myths and monsters.

He was working on two unrelated projects: one on the Hereford map, one of the most detailed surviving maps from the Middle Ages, and another on Japanese woodblock prints. He stumbled on the wrong map—a map of eighth century China—while looking for a map of 18th century Japan. With this and the Hereford map side by side on his desk, Mittman noticed something interesting.

“It struck me that they were actually the same map in the way they worked. In a series of increasing ‘alarm,’ the further you get from the center of things, the worse things get,” he said. “There is one really crucial difference though, and that is where the mapmakers put themselves.”

In the Chinese map, China is in the center of the map, in the “zone of princes.” At the edges of the map is the “zone of cultureless savagery,” where the monsters live. At the geographic, conceptual, and spiritual middle of the Hereford map is Jerusalem, the holy center of English life during the Middle Ages. Jerusalem was not only the place where Jesus was crucified, but also believed to be the site of his return. “This was really the focus of the medieval Christians’ hopes and aspirations,” said Mittman. “They were sort of anxious for the end of the world because their world was kind of terrible.”

England, however, is at the bottom edge of the world, about as far from the center of the map as possible. And also far from the center is the savage zone containing the monsters. Mittman started to wonder about the monsters that shared this “zone of cultureless savagery” with the mapmaker. “I worked from the maps to the monsters on the maps to the monsters off the maps, and I started looking for monsters in medieval stuff,” said Mittman. “And I found them everywhere. Once you start looking for them, they are all-pervasive.”

He looked at medieval encyclopedias of monsters, including The Wonders of the East. Interestingly, the medieval people living in China had a similar volume, the Shan-hai Ching, which we might think of as The Wonders of the West, situating the exact same creatures in the West. “What’s important is that they aren’t here,” said Mittman. “Wherever we are, they aren’t.”

The monsters in the English book look like distorted Europeans; those in the Chinese book look like distorted Chinese people. “Wonderfully, while the monsters are always the people from the other side of the world, they always look just like us,” said Mittman. “We can’t conceive of things outside of our own selves. Go watch any alien movie. What does the alien ultimately look like? It’s a person but really thin and green; it’s a person but with a big head and big eyes. They are always us.”

These monsters come, as far back as we can trace, from India’s ancient Sanskrit texts, said Mittman. The stories of these particular creatures seem to have traveled from India to China and to Greece and then Europe. The monsters themselves are distinct creatures, some horrific, some benign, all of them human-like in some way. Mittman’s favorite, the blemmye, is a squat headless person with eyes and nose in the center of its chest. From the pages of The Wonders of the East, the blemmye stares at the reader somewhat disconcertingly, grasping the edges of its frame like it is about to step over the edge of the image into the human world (see image above).

Another monster, the panotii, has long ears that it slings over its shoulders like a scarf during the day and wraps itself up into sleep. This shy creature flees from humans and sweats blood when frightened.

These monsters were believed to be “real, tangible, physical things” that existed “out there somewhere,” said Mittman. Teratologists (those who study monsters) and medieval scholars are still debating what the monsters meant to medieval people. They were possibly reminders that rules of nature don’t apply to God, says Mittman, or warnings about the myriad punishments for various sins. They definitely pushed the boundaries of what it meant to be human in the Middle Ages.

These mysteries of monsters and their place in medieval society and on medieval maps became Mittman’s doctoral dissertation, which he has since expanded into the book Maps and Monsters in Medieval England. He is now writing with Susan Kim of Illinois State University Inconceivable Beasts: Wonders of the East and the Beowulf Manuscript on the Wonders, an encyclopedia of monstrous people that was one of the five books bound in the original Beowulf manuscript. The book has been largely ignored by medieval scholars until now, said Mittman, in spite of the fact that it was bound with one of the world’s most well-known epic poems. Mittman has also received a $50,000 National Endowment for the Humanities grant to do a large-scale digitization of the Hereford Map and other medieval maps.

Mittman’s scholarly future, at least for now, is bound to the monsters and marvels he finds throughout medieval maps and manuscripts. When he is occasionally asked whether he believes in them, “I do not believe in the monsters,” he answers, “but I believe that they believed in them. And we are still a monster-obsessed people. We can’t dismiss them as silly fairy-stories that the benighted people of the ‘Dark Ages’ believed in. They were and are vital components in the processes through which we understand our most basic identity as human beings.”

Asa Mittman is a new faculty member in the Department of Art and Art History. He received his BA in art history from Cornell University and his MA and PhD from Stanford. He previously taught at Santa Clara, Bucknell, and Arizona State.

—Anna Harris, Public Affairs and Publications