Marvels, Monsters, and Miracles: Studies in the Medieval and Early Modern Imaginations(42 Studies in Medieval Culture)

This collection of essays examines medieval and early modern perceptions of the marvelous and the monstrous. The essays investigate the nature of those phenomena and how people of these periods experienced them and how they recreated that experience for others. The essays trace the development of representations of marvels and explicate individual incarnations of monster and miracles. They analyze the importance of marvelous difference in defining ethnic, racial, religious, class, and gender identities to ask what legacy the medieval confrontations with marvels left for the modern world. These excellent essays look at issues that have long perplexed readers, such as the meaning of marvels, and whether we can read them in earnest or whether they can be appreciated only as play. The different authors bring their expertise to the fore to discuss the development of thoughts on marvels from the classical tradition through the concept’s development in the medieval and early modern tradition. This collection is essential reading for any analysis of the marvelous in these periods and the state of scholarship surrounding them.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments
Introduction: The Marvelous Imagination
The Medieval Other: The Middle Ages as Other by Paul Freedman
Marvelous Peoples or Marvelous Races? Race and the Anglo-Saxon Wonders of the East by Greta Austin
Wonders of the Beast: India in Classical and Medieval Literature by Andrea Rossi-Reder
The Book of John Mandeville and the Geography of Identity by Martin Camargo
Froissart's “Debate of the Horse and the Greyhound”: Companion Animals and Signs of Social Status in the Fourteenth Century by Kristen M. Figg
The Miracle of the Lengthened Beam in Apocryphal and Hagiographic Tradition by Thomas N. Hall
Falling Giants and Floating Lead: Scholastic History in the Middle English Cleanness by Michael W. Twomey
From Monster to Martyr: The Old English Legend of Saint Christopher by Joyce Tally Lionarons
Fighting Men, Fighting Monsters: Outlawry, Masculinity, and Identity in the Gesta Herewardi by Timothy S. Jones
Monsters of Misogyny: Bigorne and Chicheface-suite et fin? by Malcolm Jones
Depicting the Insane: A Thirteenth-Century Case Study by David A. Sprunger
Magic and Metafiction in The Franklin's Tale: Chaucer's Clerk of Orléans as Double of the Franklin by Paul Battles
Portentous Births and the Monstrous Imagination in Renaissance Culture by Norman R. Smith
The Nude Cyclops in the Costume Book by Mary Baine Campbell
Contributors

About the Author :
Timothy S. Jones is an adjunct professor of English at the University of Minnesota and the University of St. Thomas. David A. Sprunger is the current holder of the Walther G. Prausnitz Endowed Chair in English at Concordia College.