UW Notebook  |  Video

October 23, 2024

Video: UW historian on medieval European monsters, and the meaning of monsters

Zombies, werewolves, demons and countless other monsters have been part of society for as long as humanity has existed. In medieval times, they appeared in almost every church in Europe, from artwork to stained glass to sculptures. These monsters also decorated the margins of manuscripts, sometimes even appearing as the main characters. In modern society, monsters appear in movies, books and television shows. These monsters are more than just a part of the story’s narrative — they can give us a glimpse into the norms and beliefs of society at that time.

Charity Urbanski, University of Washington teaching professor of history, studies monsters and monstrosities in medieval European chronicles and recently published a book, “Medieval Monstrosity: Imagining the Monstrous in Medieval Europe.” One of her focuses is the purpose monsters served for medieval Europeans and what we can learn about medieval European society by looking at the monsters these people created, which served as vehicles for expressing their anxieties and fears.

“There were a lot of different things in both the ancient and medieval worlds that defined a monster,” Urbanski said. “Some of them were physical — like excess, deficiency, deformity, hybridity. And then there were a whole host of cultural or behavioral attributes that could also be defined as monstrous. These sort of were set against what was considered to be civilized.”

Urbanski’s favorite monsters are dragons, werewolves and revenants — the undead ancestors of modern-day vampires and zombies — because they have been carried over for centuries from medieval Europe to modern society.

“This idea of the undead, people who bodily returned from the dead for one reason or another, must just appeal to some profoundly dark aspect of the human psyche: This fear that the dead are going to return,” Urbanski said. “That is definitely one of the things that just seems to cut across cultures and across time periods.”

Stories about werewolves have also withstood the test of time, Urbanski says. Werewolves in the Middle Ages were knights who, after returning home from war, would take off their clothing and go live like wolves in the woods, killing humans and animals. When a wife would go looking for her husband, she would find his clothing and take it, trapping him in wolf form.

“The anxieties expressed in these tales really have to do with the knights themselves,” Urbanski said. “Their primary function in society is warfare. They go and engage in what could be considered bestial acts on a regular basis, killing other people.”

These transformations of the knight into the werewolf were voluntary, she said. The man would take off his clothing or put on a ring and transform into a wolf. In modern werewolf stories, however, the transformation is usually involuntary. The person is often bitten and turned into a werewolf during a full moon.

The wife is often seen as the monster in the medieval versions, Urbanski said, because she would find a new lover once she had trapped her husband in wolf form. In these stories, the werewolf would befriend the king and show he is still noble, honorable and rational. The wife would eventually be questioned. After revealing that she trapped her husband in wolf form and ran off with another knight, the wife would be punished.

“I think that humans can’t really live without monsters on some level, because they’re just so helpful to us in so many ways, whether it’s helping us define what makes us human or, again, sort of policing boundaries,” Urbanski said. “They’re just too useful. If they didn’t exist, we’d have to invent them.”

For more information, contact Urbanski at urbanski@uw.edu.

 

 

 

Tag(s): Charity Urbanski • College of Arts & Sciences • Department of History

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