Les monstres des hommes: Un inventaire critique de l’humanité au XIIIe siècle. Édition bilingue avec ses enluminures, traduite, présentée et annotée par Pierre-Olivier Dittmar et Maud Pérez-Simon. Moyen Âge: Éditions bilingues. Paris: Champion Classiques: Honoré Champion, 2024, 352 pp., 49 colored images.

Throughout the Middle Ages and far beyond, monsters have populated people’s minds, mappaemundi, literary works, and artworks. We know most of the monsters since antiquity (Pliny the Elder), and they normally fit common types that were then handed down in history. Monsters are the ‘others’ par excellence, and they have always served, since the time of Homer, for the protagonist as ideal opponents whom he can overcome and kill so that he able to rise in public esteem (Beowulf). There are hardly ever nice or kind monsters. One curious example, however, can be found in the pre-courtly Herzog Ernst (ms. A., ca. 1170/80; ms. B., ca. 1220) where the protagonist defeats giants and monsters and then takes specimens of each group with him as part of his menagerie in Bavaria, Germany.