An Excess of the Repressed: Medieval Monsters as Expressions of Excess Human Sensation in the Beowulf Manuscript Trisha D. Gupta, New York University The description and conceptualization of monstrous bodies in European medieval texts was, and continues to be, a field of intense developing scholarship holding significant—and perhaps unexpected—implications for how we define what makes us human. The Beowulf Manuscript is rich with intricate descriptions of medieval monsters, and the tradition of monstrous categorization further manifests itself in the Etymologies of Isidore of Seville and the Liber Monstrorum.1 Scholars such as Susan Kim, in her “Man-Eating Monsters and Ants as Big as Dogs,” theorize that these bestiaries and catalogs of monsters, such as those in The Wonders of the East, stem from a deep-rooted need not only to define monsters but also to define ourselves through articulating differences between what is monstrous and what is human. Kim states that “It is about what identifies the monsters and other wonders of the East: as such it is also about what identifies the humans in England, from whom these monsters are ostensibly to be distinguished” (39). She explores the purpose of this distinction by asserting that “monster catalogues can reassure their readers” through reminding readers of their numerous differences from monsters and adherence to human normalcy—a recapitulation that we are not what monsters are (40). Here, Kim hints at a language of conceptualizing monstrosity through what it is and comprehending humanity through what it is not. She refines this claim, however, by articulating a complexity: “monsters have meaning outside their described physical manifestations” (43). She suggests that the bodily differences between humans and monsters, though documented physically in catalogs and bestiaries, hold deeper implications that are quite literally “outside” of mere physicality and the superficiality of disparate limbs and body parts. Kim recognizes this subcutaneous connection between understanding the self through defining the monster and prompts the budding question of how classifying monsters externally allows us to classify ourselves internally. Peter Dendle, in his “Cryptozoology in the Medieval and Modern Worlds,” begins to offer a
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