Representing Beasts in Early Medieval England and Scandinavia

This book explores the representation of animals, birds, and insects in early medieval material culture, including texts, carvings, and landscapes. It reveals a world where the boundaries between humans, animals, monsters, and objects were blurred and often permeable, and where representing the bestial could be a mirror to the self.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 312 pages
Publication date: 12 March 2019
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer Ltd

The early Middle Ages were a time when the earth, air, water, and ether were teeming with other beings, some of which were sentient creatures that swam, flew, slithered, or stalked through the same environments as their human contemporaries. These beings could be objects that modern beholders would be unlikely to think of as living things, but which possessed a vitality that rendered them potent. They could also be things half glimpsed on a dark night or seen only in the mind's eye, strange beasts that haunted dreams and visions or inhabited exotic lands beyond the compass of everyday knowledge.

This book explores the various ways in which the early English and Scandinavians thought about and represented these other inhabitants of their world, and considers the multi-faceted nature of the relationship between people and beasts. Drawing on evidence from material culture, art, language, literature, place-names, and landscapes, the studies presented here reveal a world where the boundaries between humans, animals, monsters, and objects were blurred and often permeable. To represent the bestial could be to hold a mirror to the self.

Michael D. J. Bintley is Lecturer in Early Medieval Literature and Culture at Birkbeck, University of London, and Thomas Williams is a former curator of Early Medieval Coins at the British Museum. Contributors to this book include Noël Adams, John Baker, Michael D. J. Bintley, Sue Brunning, László Sándor Chardonnens, Della Hooke, Eric Lacey, Richard North, Marijane Osborn, Victoria Symons, and Thomas J. Williams.

Weight: 484g
Dimension: 156 x 233 x 15 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781783273690