Medieval Monsters

 Medieval people talked a lot about monsters. Their "bestiaries," books that discussed the supposed nature of different animals (such as that dogs were very faithful, or that lions feared white roosters), also included such monsters as the manticore, a creature with a human face, the body of a lion (usually red), and the tail and stinger of a scorpion. It ate human flesh (note the leg in the monster's mouth).

 

Depictions of manticores in the 13th century often gave them features similar to the features found in images depicting Jews. Faces would have a big hooked nose and a scruffy beard, and the manticore might wear a so-called Phrygian cap, a conical cap with a peak that tipped forward. Thus the artist could make a cruel antisemitic statement while also drawing a monstrous beast. (Julia DeBardeleben has been studying such "Jewish" manticore images.)

(Interestingly, the Phrygian cap was used in ancient Rome to identify freed slaves and during the French Revolution to designate citizens revolting against tyranny. But in the Middle Ages it meant Jews. It had many uses.)

As this example illustrates, medieval monsters were often hybrids. They had body parts of several different kinds of creatures. Deformed features could also count as monstrous, which was rather hard on disabled people.

There were plenty of stories about Wild Men, monsters who were humanoid but large and hairy, one might even say like today's Bigfoot.   These monsters could be rumored to live in some distant, wild place, or be metaphors for what people are not supposed to be like.

Lacking rationality made you into a Wild Man. Jews (again) could be characterized as monstrous because they apparently couldn't grasp the perfectly logical (or at least logical to medieval theologians) arguments why Christianity was right and Judaism wrong.  (It is of course striking that medieval people assumed that your reasoning ability would lead you to the Correct view of religion, unless your brain was deformed.)

Monsters were not always scary. Sometimes they were just the strange creatures supposedly found in distant lands, like the upside-down people on the underside of the planet, with huge toes to cling to the earth so they wouldn't fall off, or the men with heads like dogs believed to live in India (Columbus looked unsuccessfully for them when he reached the Americas).

© C. Dale Brittain 2026

For more on medieval ideas about animals and religion as well as other aspects of medieval history, see my book Positively Medieval, available on Amazon and other ebook platforms.  Also available in paperback.