Abstract
In this chapter, I turn to the late medieval travel narrative The Book of John Mandeville to consider the many ways that the subterranean realms were imagined as spaces in which social categories of monstrosity and disability are entangled with and transformed by the ecological agency of caves and the underground. Caves impressed their material properties into the flesh of their inhabitants, and in the world of The Book, those cave-dwellers were often monsters. By bridging Stacy Alaimo’s concept of “transcorporeality” to medieval theories of the influence of climate and geography on the body, I argue that subterranean monsters are marked as insufficiently human because their living in the earth has made them something else; and yet, I also argue that dwelling underground imparts certain bodily capacities to these monsters: abilities and pleasures that enrich our understanding of nature and embodiment in the Middle Ages, and a futurity that complicates present discourses surrounding disability.
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Notes
- 1.
The translations of The Book in this introduction are all taken from The Book of John Mandeville with Related Texts, ed. and trans. Iain Macleod Higgins (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 2011), 166. Higgins’s edition compiles the many manuscripts comprising the original French Book and is used here for its clarity of prose as well as its capacious selection of materials. I side with Higgins, who considers The Book as a multi-text comprising the sum of its many variants; therefore, I also turn to several different manuscripts and iterations when those particular texts intensify subterranean narratives.
- 2.
“– so many that if there had been an all-out war between the two most powerful kings in the country, and the greater part were routed, there scarcely would have been as many dead as there were in this valley, which was a very hideous thing to see.” Higgins, The Book, 167.
- 3.
Interestingly and quite relevant to this chapter, Edward Wheatley observes the way the metaphor of the spiritual blindness of Jews and the discriminatory attitudes against the physically blind people of medieval Europe were yoked together to create a discourse of exclusion and marginalization. See “Chapter 3: ‘Blind’ Jews and Blind Christians: The Metaphorics of Marginalization,” in Edward Wheatley, Stumbling Blocks before the Blind: Medieval Constructions of a Disability (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2010), 63–89.
- 4.
Stacy Alaimo, Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), 2.
- 5.
Isidore of Seville, The Etymologies of Isidore of Seville, trans. Barney et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), IX.ii.105, p. 198.
- 6.
Many scholars recognize the ways that monsters challenge our attempts to create stable categories of meaning, and Asa Simon Mittman’s richly evocative and intensely sensory summary of the “impact” of the epistemological ruptures they manifest best summarizes the posthuman potential of monsters as, “that which calls into question our (their, anyone’s) epistemological worldview, highlights its fragmentary and inadequate nature, and thereby asks us (often with fangs at our throats, with its fire upon our skin, even as we and our stand-ins and body doubles descend the gullet) to acknowledge the failures of our systems of categorization.” Asa Simon Mittman, “Introduction: The Impact of Monsters and Monster Studies,” in The Ashgate Research Companion to Monsters and the Monstrous, eds. Asa Simon Mittman and Peter J. Dendle (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2012), 8.
- 7.
Alaimo, Bodily Natures, 139.
- 8.
Middle English quotations from The Book of John Mandeville are taken from the Defective Version edited by Tamarah Kohanski and C. David Benson (Kalamazoo: TEAMS Middle English Texts, 2007). Available online at: http://d.lib.rochester.edu/teams/text/kohanski-and-benson-the-book-of-john-mandeville. All translations are my own.
- 9.
As Joshua Eyler defines the cultural model, it “does away with distinctions between impairment and disability, preferring instead to use the term ‘disability’ to include both the reality of corporeal differences as well as the effects of social stigmatization.” The cultural model recognizes that physical impairment and cultural exclusion work together to define the existence of the disabled person whose bodily capacities must be understood as informing the way they negotiate both the social norms and physical structures of a society. See “Introduction: Breaking Boundaries, Building Bridges,” in Disability in the Middle Ages: Reconsiderations and Reverberations, ed. Joshua R. Eyler (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010), 6.
- 10.
Tory Vandeventer Pearman, Women and Disability in Medieval Literature, The New Middle Ages (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 11.
- 11.
Pearman, Women and Disability, 13.
- 12.
Ruth Mazo Karras, Common Women: Prostitution and Sexuality in Medieval England (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 87.
- 13.
Dana M. Oswald, Monsters, Gender and Sexuality in Medieval English Literature, Gender in the Middle Ages 5 (Rochester, NY: D.S. Brewer, 2010), 25.
- 14.
Oswald, Monsters, 132.
- 15.
Tory Pearman, “Disruptive Dames: Disability and the Loathly Lady in the Tale of Florent, the Wife of Bath’s Tale, and the Weddynge of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnelle,” in The Treatment of Disabled Persons in Medieval Europe: Examining Disability in the Historical, Legal, Literary, Medical and Religious Discourses of the Middle Ages, eds. Wendy J. Turner and Tory Vandeventer Pearman (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2010), 293.
- 16.
Pearman, “Disruptive Dames,” 297.
- 17.
Pearman, “Disruptive Dames,” 293.
- 18.
However, Pearman argues strongly that Dame Ragnelle is not fully normalized because she gives birth to a son who “represents the birth of a new order, an order that embraces the Other.” Pearman, “Disruptive Dames,” 311.
- 19.
Alison Kafer, Feminist, Queer, Crip (Bloomington and Indianapolis: University of Indiana Press, 2013), 83.
- 20.
Descriptions of troglodytes differ across these various sources, and Isidore of Seville, for instance, defines the Troglodytes as “a tribe of Ethiopians so called because they run with such speed that they chase down wild animals on foot” (IX.ii.129). The Etymologies, 199. John Block Friedman’s The Monstrous Races in Medieval Art and Thought (Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 2000), is peppered with references to troglodytes.
- 21.
Tim Ingold, Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description (London and New York: Routledge, 2011), 10.
- 22.
Geoffrey Chaucer, “The Former Age,” in The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson, 3rd ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987), 650–51.
- 23.
As Gillian Rudd argues, the poem is haunted by an anthropocentric perspective—what is idyllic here is that nature provides explicitly for the human, that “humans are securely at the top of the hierarchy in this idealised world.” Greenery: Ecocritical Readings of Late Medieval English Literature (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2007), 14. In contrast, Karl Steel points out that the poem presents a kind of shared vulnerability, “a fundamental passivity and exposure shared by all things,” that conveys a kind of authentic antihumanist perspective; ecological thought recognizes that everything can be wounded. Karl Steel, “A Fourteenth-Century Ecology: ‘The Former Age’ with Dindimus,” in Rethinking Chaucerian Beasts, ed. Carolynn van Dyke (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 190. I think the poem supports both arguments, as it conveys a very human desire for a life of greater ease, even if humans in this former age “eete nat half ynough” (11).
- 24.
London, British Library, Harley MS 3954 f. 40v. Available online at: http://www.bl.uk/catalogues/illuminatedmanuscripts/ILLUMINBig.ASP?size=big&IllID=16706
- 25.
Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), 159.
- 26.
Cohen, Stone, 159.
- 27.
Stacy Alaimo, Exposed: Environmental Politics and Pleasures in Posthuman Times (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), 30.
- 28.
Karl Steel, “Creeping Things: Spontaneous Generation and Material Creativity,” in Elemental Ecocriticism, eds. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Lowell Duckert (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), 223.
- 29.
Alexander Weheliye, Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human (Durham and London: Duke UP, 2014): 127.
- 30.
Carolyn Dinshaw, How Soon Is Now? Medieval Texts, Amateur Readers, and the Queerness of Time (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012), 78.
- 31.
Cohen, Stone, 160–1.
- 32.
Kafer, Feminist, 45.
- 33.
Kafer, Feminist, 145.
- 34.
Kafer, Feminist, 148.
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Montroso, A.S. (2019). Dwelling Underground in The Book of John Mandeville: Monstrosity, Disability, Ecology. In: Godden, R.H., Mittman, A.S. (eds) Monstrosity, Disability, and the Posthuman in the Medieval and Early Modern World. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-25458-2_14
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