The Exposed Body and the Gendered Blemmye: Reading the Wonders of the East

Becoming Undone: Monstrosity, leaslicum wordum, and the Strange Case of the Donestre

“…Sexual identification of the Vitellius Donestre is comparatively more difficult as it is not endowed with obvious protruding genitalia like the Tiberius image but rather has a sizeable "V" shape in the groin area. In a recent study, Asa Mittman and Susan Kim propose that the figure has clear and easily visible male genitals, 27 and Kim, in an earlier study, posits that the Vitellius illustrator "pairs the monster with a female figure unmentioned by the text, thus providing a context of sexual difference to underscore the exposure of a clearly male monster." 28 Mittman and Kim's sexual identification of the Vitellius Donestre as male is visually plausible, but given the accompanying text, the illuminator was not compelled to make the Donestre externally masculine because the plural pronoun hi is consistently used to describe all the monstrous races in the Wonders, and being neuter, it could refer to either masculine or feminine grammatical gender.…”

Introduction: The Future is Necessarily Monstrous

“…5 In the present collection, both Lewis and Saunders observe how nudity operates as a prominent sign of monstrosity in texts and images concerned with Antichrist and the Donestre, respectively. In the medieval world, monstrous genitalia are especially problematic, whether the carefully rendered female genitals of the headless Tiberius Blemmye (Figure 1), 6 or the gigantic phallic hat that the Morgan Beatus Antichrist wears. The Tiberius Donestre's bright red penis similarly does not inspire comfort, but then, it is difficult to find anything comforting about a beast-headed speaker of all languages who routinely devours (except for their heads) the new acquaintances with whom it has just bonded socially.…”