“Introduction: The Impact of Monsters and Monster Studies,” in Research Companion to Monsters and the Monstrous, ed. Asa Simon Mittman, with Peter Dendle (London: Ashgate, 2012), 1-14

Abstract: This essay attempts to draw connections between medieval maps and their
many monsters, digital cartographical interfaces, and modern experiences of the world.
Each impacts our understandings of the others. The medieval notion of speculum – the
metaphorical mirror that allows us to see our worlds and ourselves more clearly – dra…[Read more]

This essay considers the user experience of Google Earth, comparing the world it presents with other world views including static print maps, medieval mappaemundi, and Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights. It also considers the scopic environment of Google Earth in relation to Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon, a theoretical prison design int…[Read more]

“Introduction to Mappings,” with Dan Terkla, Peregrinations: The Official Publication of the International Society for the Study of Pilgrimage Art, vol. IV:I (2013): 134-160

“Forking Paths? Matthew Paris, Jorge Luis Borges, and Maps of the Labyrinth,” Peregrinations: The Official Publication of the International Society for the Study of Pilgrimage Art, vol. IV:I (2013): 134-160

Medieval Christian mapmakers represented a range of peoples, animals and monsters against which they defined their place what they believed to be God’s divine plan. Rooted in earlier anti-Semitic tropes, the detailed world maps of the thirteenth/early fourteenth centuries contain multiple problematic representations of Jews, perceived at once as d…[Read more]

This conclusion attempts to reconsider the notion of animation, raised throughout the special issue of Preternature. It uses a remarkable sixteenth-century clockwork automaton friar to test the limits of mechanical animation in the medieval and remodern periods. This figure, traditionally ascribed to Juanelo Turriano, mechanician to Emperor…[Read more]

This essay considers the use of the modern term ‘monstrous races’ to describe the wondrous beings found in Herodotus, Pliny, The Wonders of the East, world maps and elsewhere. Considering the etymology and history of the word ‘race,’ a series of modern definitions are tested out on figures found in the images and texts of the British Library…[Read more]

This article focuses on the images and texts on page 3 of Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Junius 11, in which Lucifer foments rebellion, falls, and, as Satan, is bound to the mouth of hell. The bottom third of the page contains an image of falling angels, Satan, and the hellmouth. Above that image and to the left is written “hER SE,” Old English for…[Read more]

British Library Harley MS 3954’s Book of Sir John Mandeville has ninety-nine images, and another thirty-five blanks, carefully framed in thin lines of ink as part of the ruling of the manuscript. As is so often the case, the blanks appear more frequently toward the end. On the final folio (69v) there appears a neatly framed blank space (Figure 1…[Read more]

The eleventh-century Old English Illustrated Hexateuch, probably produced in the second quarter of the eleventh century, in or near St. Augustine’s Abbey, Canterbury, houses a wealth of imagery, including several images of giants that appear throughout the manuscript’s approximately 400 images and 156 folios. These giants form a primary point of…[Read more]

Monstrous iconography was a major, even central, element of the visual arts throughout the entire medieval period, Early Christian through late Gothic, east and west, north and south. There are few—if any—medieval cultural traditions that do not rely on monstrous imagery for vital cultural functions. Within this catchall category, often def…[Read more]

“Robed in Martyrdom: The Flaying of Saint Bartholomew in the Laudario of Sant’Agnese,” with Christine Sciacca, Flaying in the Pre-Modern World, ed. Larissa Tracy (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2017)

This essay will bring a postcolonial gaze to an eclectic array of subjects, including medieval and modern images and texts, and modern scholarship thereon. It is the result of my thinking not so much about medieval geographical images and texts, like the small gem that is the Psalter Map, Matthew Paris’s Map of the Holy Land and the Book of Sir j…[Read more]

Our focus is a remarkable object – or, rather, a collection of objects, in turn housed within another object, which bears on it representations of yet other things: a reliquary box, once held in the treasury of the Sancta Sanctorum in the Lateran Palace, containing bits of stone, wood, and cloth, labeled with locations from the “Holy Land”. The b…[Read more]

Susan Kim and Asa Simon Mittman, “Keeping History: Images, Texts, Ciphers, and the Franks Casket,” with Susan Kim, in A Material History of Medieval and Early Modern Ciphers, ed. K Ellison and S Kim (New York: Routledge, 2017)

“Here there be Dragons”

Medieval Christians arguably lived in a ‘real’ world – a tangible place in which they lived, worked, loved, hated, and died – but through a process of worldbuilding continually reconstructed it anew around themselves as the mythical land they called ‘Christendom.’ This was predicated first on reconceptualizing and then ultimately on removing (o…[Read more]

I want to touch the Middle Ages. I want to hold all of the works of art in all the museums. I want to turn the pages, not by touching a screen or mouse in the Brit- ish Library’s Turning The PagesTM app, but by touching vellum in the British Li- brary’s reading room. I want to open and close the wings on altarpieces, to feel ivories warm in my han…[Read more]

This study centers on issues of marginality and monstrosity in medieval England. In the middle ages, geography was viewed as divinely ordered, so Britain’s location at the periphery of the inhabitable world caused anxiety among its inhabitants. Far from the world’s holy center, the geographic margins were considered monstrous. Medieval geography,…[Read more]