Deformed Discourse: The Function of the Monster in Mediaeval Thought and Literature

Patricia Morley is professor emerita of English and Canadian studies at
Concordia University, and the author of Kurlek, Margaret Laurence: The
Long Journey Home, and As Though Life Mattered: Leo Kennedy’s Story.

Teratology—the study of prodigies, the monstrous, and the
marvelous—is a word that David Williams intends to restore to our
vocabulary. In Deformed Discourse, Williams first explores the roots of
the concept in mediaeval philosophy and theology, and then goes on to
analyse it in literature and art. His study of the grotesque in the
Middle Ages brings together mediaeval research and modern criticism. His
argument is presented in three parts: theory, classification, and
illustration. To illustrate his argument, he takes three heroic sagas
and three saints’ lives—those of St. Denis, St. Christopher, and St.
Wilgeforte.

He calls the Middle Ages the most intellectually speculative period of
Western civilization, arguing that in this era the deformed often
functioned as “a complementary, sometimes alternative, vehicle for
philosophical and spiritual enquiry ... The Middle Ages made deformity
into a symbolic tool with which it probed the secrets of substance,
existence, and form incompletely revealed by the more orthodox rational
approach.”

Williams traces this deformed discourse to the pre-Christian tradition
of philosophical negation, also called negative theology, and to a
central idea that God cannot be known except by knowing what he is not.
The monster became the chief sign or symbol of negation and paradox.
Classical and mediaeval concepts such as the harpy, the centaur, and the
basilisk entered the language, the literature, and the arts.

Deformed Discourse is closely argued and is also attractively
illustrated with black-and-white representations of monsters. A
difficult book, it repays a slow and careful reading with a deeper
understanding of thought and art in the Middle Ages.