Hybridity, Identity, and Monstrosity in Medieval Britain
Subtitle
On Difficult Middles
"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.
Bio
Jeffrey Jerome Cohen is a professor of English and dean of humanities in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Arizona State University.
Praise for this book
Cohen has in many ways defined the field of study known, following his seminal publication of the same title, as ‘Monster Theory’ ... Cohen’s 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
