Synopses & Reviews
Hybridity, Identity and Monstrosity in Medieval Britain examines an island made turbulent by conquest and civil war. Focusing upon history writing, ethnography, and saints' lives, this book details how community was imagined in the twelfth century; what role the monsterization of the Welsh, Irish and Jews played in bringing about English unity; and how writers who found the blood of two peoples mixed in their bodies struggled to find a vocabulary to express their identity. Its chapters explores the function and origin of myths like the unity and separateness of the English, the barbarism of the Celtic Fringe, the innate desire of Jews to murder Christian children as part of their Pesach ritual. Populated by wonders like a tempest formed of blood, a Saracen pope, strange creatures suspended between the animal and the human, and corpses animated with uncanny life,
Hybridity, Identity and Monstrosity in Medieval Britain maps how collective identities form through violent exclusions, and details the price paid by those who find themselves denied the possibility of belonging.
Review
“
Hybridity, Identity, Monstrosity intervenes in the contested debate over the categories of “race” and “ethnicity” in pre-modern studies. Cohen imaginatively explores the proposition that culture can function like nature, thus engaging rich readings of a canon of medieval chronicles. His critical touch enables the monsterizations of the past to erupt into the present with an "unhistorical" force that shatters the "middle" of the Middle Ages.”—Kathleen Biddick, Professor of History, Temple University.
“Cohen has in many ways defined the field of study known, following his seminal publication of the same title, as ‘Monster Theory . . . Cohens book, constructing images of communities that reconfigured themselves as ‘imperiled through the invention of fictitious enemies (152), is therefore not only a useful lens through which we might view the distant past, but (a rare and vital quality) also one through which we might reconsider our own troubled present.” -Asa Simon Mittman, Studies in the Age of Chaucer
Synopsis
This study examines the monsters that haunt twelfth-century British texts, arguing that in these strange bodies are expressed fears and fantasies about community, identity and race during the period. Cohen finds the origins of these monsters in a contemporary obsession with blood, both the literal and metaphorical kind.
Synopsis
A study of the monsters that haunt twelfth-century British texts.
About the Author
Jeffrey Jerome Cohen is Professor of English at the George Washington University in Washington, DC. His work has long explored identity, postcoloniality and monstrosity in medieval literature. He is the author of
Medieval Identity Machines and
Of Giants, and the editor of
The Postcolonial Middle Ages,
Thinking the Limits of the Body,
Becoming Male in the Middle Ages, and
Monster Theory. His essays have appeared in numerous journals, including
Speculum,
New Literary History,
Exemplaria, and the
Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies.
Table of Contents
Introduction: In medias res * Acts of Separation: Shaping Communal Bodies * Between Belongongs: History's Middle * In the Borderlands: The Identity od Gerald of Wales * City of Catastrophes * The Flow of Blood in Norwich * Epilogue: In medias res