Experiencing Strangeness: Monstrous Peoples on the Edge of the Earth as Depicted on Medieval Mappae Mundi

Abstract

This essay argues that the monstrous peoples depicted on the edge of the œcumene in medieval maps of the world are not the expression of a medieval preference for the bizarre or fantastic, or the reflection of a mythically oriented consciousness. Rather, they need to be ap proached as a genuine confrontation with the strange or the alien. Drawing on insights from sociological theory, the essay suggests that as liminal figures, the monstra articulate a transcendence inherent in strangeness; at the same time they help define the borders ofgenus humanum, hence in the end to define what is one's own.