Maps and Monsters in Medieval England: Revised and Expanded Twentieth-Anniversary Edition

This book's central thesis is that notions of monstrosity and geographic marginality were central to the formation of an English identity in the Middle Ages. Medieval Christian theologians believed that geography was divinely ordered, so their perception of Britain as being in the monstrous periphery of the world caused anxiety among its inhabitants that we can see expressed across media and genres. Medieval cartography, for centuries scorned as crude, is now the subject of numerous careful studies; monsters, likewise long ignored in scholarship, are now of great interest. This book sits at the crossroads of these two discourses (critical cartography and monster studies), treated separately in most scholarship. Nearly twenty years after its initial publication, Maps and Monsters in Medieval England remains the only extended study of the role of monsters on medieval maps and of the ways that ideas about geography shaped the role of monsters in other contexts, where they were marshaled as part of an ongoing effort to define what it meant to be human, English, and Christian. This volume is intended for professional scholars, graduate students, and advanced undergraduates. Translations are provided for all Latin and Old English texts to render the volume accessible to a wider range of readers.

About the Author

Asa Simon Mittman (Professor of Art & Art History, California State University, Chico) has been studying demonizing images and their impacts for twenty-five years. He is the author of Cartographies of Exclusion: Anti-Semitic Mapping in Medieval England (2024) and Maps and Monsters in Medieval England (2006, second edition 2026), co-author of Inconceivable Beasts: The Wonders of the East in the Beowulf Manuscript (2013), and co-curator of Medieval Monsters: Terrors, Aliens, Wonders at The Pierpont Morgan Library & Museum (2018). He has published fifty articles and chapters, edited five volumes, and delivered dozens of invited lectures and conference talks on these subjects.