ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on a cultural exploration of the monster, and its successor figures, such as the savage and freak. It presents medieval anti-Semitic imagery, as based on the backdrop of the medieval monster; the exotic monsters and savages of the New World; the literary monster as imagined by Mary Shelley in Frankenstein; and new uses of deformity as illustrated by the nineteenth-century freak show. Experts in early modern Jewish history have analysed the changing languages of orthodoxy and its disturbance in the medieval period, with new polarities, as in the figure of “the Jew” as inferior being and antithesis of “the Christian”. A. Pagden suggests that before 1492, the margins and unknowns of the world were “imaginary spaces” filled by Europeans with the natural phenomena of ancient and medieval literature. The medieval world adopted the strategy of “wonder” as one possible response to the otherness of the other, when phenomena simply fell through the existing cultural grid.
