The Politics of Obscenity in the Age of the Gutenberg Revolution

Obscene Means in Early Modern French and European Print Culture and Literature

Peter Frei, Nelly Labère, Peter Frei, Nelly Labère

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780367537357
• eBook ISBN: 9781000530438
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Early Modern History
• Index: History

What does obscene mean? What does it have to say about the means through which meaning is produced and received in literary, artistic and, more broadly, social acts of representation and interaction? Early modern France and Europe faced these questions not only in regard to the political, religious and artistic reformations for which the Renaissance stands, but also in light of the reconfiguration of its mediasphere in the wake of the invention of the printing press. The Politics of Obscenity brings together researchers from Europe and the United States in offering scholars of early modern Europe a detailed understanding of the implications and the impact of obscene representations in their relationship to the Gutenberg Revolution which came to define Western modernity.

Part I

Obscene Means

What It Means to Be Obscene

Obscene Materials in Manuscript Culture and Early Prints

1 The Politics of Obscenity in Les Monstres des hommes, a Thirteenth-Century Manuscript

Pierre-Olivier Dittmar and Maud Pérez-Simon

DOI: 10.4324/9781003083214-4

Now we know how monsters entered French literature. It was through 37 pages and 48 images from an almost forgotten manuscript at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, a few sheets of animal skin containing a poem in an odd language, Picard, with a contorted syntax and wild rhythms, a rhyming polemic, half-moralistic, half-revolutionary, but always critical, a genuinely monstrous text linking oral language to erudite literary tactics.

The manuscript questions medieval notions of obscenity through its subject, the monsters of the East and West, but also by its abruptly vulgar language and the system it implements. In fact, by playing on montage effects between text and image as well as with normative expectations of the work’s aristocratic readership, Les Monstres des hommes (Monsters among Humans)¹ challenges the rules that then governed visual order.

Appearances here are always deceptive. The text is not, as long believed according to its first editor,² a moralized translation of the chapter on monsters of Thomas Cantimpratensis’s encyclopedia Liber de natura rerum. It is a genuine literary and political proposition, purporting to read and see established societal limits at the end of the thirteenth century.

We know little about this strange text. Preserved in a single manuscript, Les Monstres des hommes appears never to have been cited or copied during the medieval era. Published to total indifference in Berlin in 1933, the text was usually considered by the few historians who knew it to be either trivial or partly incomprehensible, while its miniatures have been described as second rate.

Les Monstres des hommes has a simple structure, with 42 monsters described sequentially, from the hybrid and the Amazon to a colossus, along with the Brahmin, cyclops and women who give birth to toads. The catalog is precisely and procedurally modeled after the chapter on monsters in De Natura Rerum by Thomas Cantimpratensis.³ Like the celebrated manuscript of this encyclopedia from Valenciennes,⁴ copied at the same period in the same geographical area, almost every monster is the subject of an image accompanying the text.

The chapters of Les Monstres des hommes are systematically divided into two sections. The first includes a description of the body and manners of peoples of the East, with a translation of the Latin text of the source encyclopedia⁵ and significant original passages, giving rise to a modest wealth of speculative anthropology. The second section offers quite vehement criticism of Western manners, described as equivalent to Eastern aberrations. The author’s critique weighs particularly heavily on all sectors of society, including lords, bailiffs, lawyers, and cardinals. He denounces certain attitudes, such as pride, anger, lust, greed, and misanthropy. Each monster has a Western equivalent, which turns out to be worse than the monsters themselves.

Perhaps because of these levels of critical violence, the author of this 1800-line text chose to remain anonymous. Internal critical elements suggest authorship by an Augustinian hermit in the monastery of Enghien in Belgium around the year 1285.⁶ More certainly, this text can be located to a Cambrai diocese, which was also Thomas Cantimpratensis’s sermonizing area.

The quality and the richness of the manuscript may be surprising, considering that it questions feudalism and reminds us that kings and queens share the same ancestors as Eastern blind people and lepers (chapter on the infirm, l. 1320–1362).⁷ The text survived in a glamorous manuscript with gold-bordered illuminations linked to three other texts, the Régime du corps by Aldebrandin de Sienne, the Bestiaire divin by Guillaume Le Clerc, and a novel of knighthood, Chevalerie de Judas Maccabé et ses nobles frères.⁸ This vast volume was most certainly produced to celebrate the matrimonial alliance of the powerful d’Enghien and Dampierre families from Hainaut, who had been historical enemies.

How could such a substantially and formally revolutionary project be conveyed by an expensive luxurious manuscript? What initially appears contradictory might in fact be the conditions necessary for the potential survival of such a text. Above all, a concerned and involved sponsor was required to enable this wondrous transmission of a marginal text in a heritage object. Marie de Rethel, Dame d’Enghien, the only living person mentioned in the text who was known for her generosity to the underprivileged, fulfilled this role. Here is a text with monsters as its central subject, sporadically abusive, readily referring to the material bodily lower stratum in a way that appears to classify it with transgressive literature. Obscenity is present here in several ways, not just related to sexuality or scatology. It is never gratuitous, but part of a virulent political statement sustained by a poetics of unveiling.

Ob-scene Monsters?

Les Monstres des hommes declares itself to be obscene literature in several ways. The etymology of the word obscene is moot. As Nelly Labère reminds us,⁹ tension exists between the manifested venery and the impure (caenum and scaevus, respectively) and the representation of what must remain offstage, ob scaena. This last etymology, proposed by the grammarian Marcus Terentius Varro, appears to be the most relevant one for our monsters. It immediately makes medieval monsters an obscenity since they live in the East, on the margins of the world, as we can see in medieval maps like the Ebstorf Map and the Hereford Mappa Mundi. In these, each little monster is shown isolated in a frame on the borders of the civilized world, and even of the entire world. Making these the subject of a work, described as the “noblest that was and will ever be”¹⁰ places downstage center what flourished in the margins, by literally committing an obscenity, or what we may call a situational obscenity. As Nelly Labère asserts, the “backside invites us to see what society puts at the back, which literature triumphantly shows in terms of its representational function/fiction.”¹¹ Etymologically, our monsters are present to ‘show’, (monstrare in latin, mostrer in ancient French) to display to society its reverse side.

The other etymology of obscenity, linked to the words scaevus (left, awkward, or sinister) and caenum (mud, muck, and junk),¹² evolved into “everything dirty,” followed by “anything contrary to modesty.” First we must recall the notion of impurity, which in the Middle Ages, according to the Bible, arose from the idea of mixture.¹³ Therefore monsters are obscene because they mix humanity and animality: men with dog heads (l. 483–520), women who give birth to toads (l. 1211–1252), women with canine teeth (l. 1077–112), men with porcine hair (l. 1051–1076). They also have paradoxical bodies that are all degraded versions of the human body created by God in His image: people with their hands and feet reversed, with eight toes on each foot (l. 401–452), those with half a face (l. 1697–1750) or a single eye (l. 719–776).¹⁴ The obscenity of these bodies is ontological through their consubstantial impurity and because they deviate from the norm.

The submissive body or revealed body would form part of an entirety which, more than forming it, reveals the underground mechanisms of the margin and center, the gap and the norm, from a perspective of displacement and transformation.¹⁵

Therefore, teratological literature, such as the work being discussed, tends towards the obscene because it generates reflections on the gap and proposes a drastic shift from the norm.

Our manuscript addresses and highlights what is ob-scaena, showing what should remain offstage, in the far reaches of the world, so that the center may continue to exist.

For some, the peoples portrayed in Les Monstres des hommes are ultimately likewise obscene in the more modern sense of being linked to sexuality and moral depravity. Men with animal loins, the first monsters cited in the book, are described as a “dirty (orde), ugly, bad, vile” population.¹⁶ The adjective ord, from the Latin horridus, “that which makes one shiver with horror,” has a strong connotation of “dirty, repugnant, disgusting” and it even has moral connot...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The Obscenity of Books: The Politics of the Obscene in Early Modern Print Culture
• Part I Obscene Means: What It Means to Be Obscene
• Obscene Materials in Manuscript Culture and Early Prints
• Shifting Obscenities, from Manuscript to Print
• Part II Obscene Expositions: Obscenity and Renaissance Print Culture
• Impressions of the Body: The Genres of Renaissance Obscenity
• The Religious Ob-Scene: Towards a Politics of Obscenity
• Part III Impressions and Reimpressions of an Obscene Modernity
• The Language in Question or the Trouble with Words
• Afterlives: On the History of Obscene Books
• List of Contributors
• Bibliography
• Subject Index
• Name Index