Perhaps even more so than in Classical times, it's not
so much a matter of monsters per se in the Middle Ages, but monstrosities
rather. We do have the blood-drinking, Geat-eating Grendel and his
swampy mother in Beowulf,
emerging from folktale and given the properly improper genealogy of
belonging to the race of Cain by the vaguely Christianizing narrative
filter. For a perspective on dragons and reptiles, see the Dinosaur-Dragon Abstract (or the article
published in Popular Culture Review). Arthurian knights encounter
some bizarre spectacles, but no "classic" monsters take hold of
our consciousness in these romances, nor in those of the better-travelled
infidel-slayers and Mandevillian map-trotters.
We do find monstrosity, however, in the form of
personifications and grotesques. In addition to architectural monsters
in the form of gargoyles (always outside the cathedrals and therefore
associated with the dangerous world outside the sanctuary of the Church)
and similar perversions of God's creatures decorating the margins of
illuminated manuscripts, the bestiaries contain bizarre creatures
alongside actual ones. Here the lines between natural science and
theology blur, so that the qualities attributed to creatures real and
legendary are read simultaneously as lurid quirks and as glimmers of a
more pervasive Christian text.
Obversely, abstractions of a religious nature take grotesque form in
literature and in artistic depiction --
particularly the Seven Deadly Sins, which are given intentionally
repulsive forms in lyrics and in Langland's Piers Plowman. Thus we
inherit archetypal images of goat-like Lechery, bilious
Gluttony, the droop-eyed slacker Sloth, and so forth. These make cameo
appearance on parade, but are meant more for contemplation than to
function as true "monsters" in the ways we will come to
expect.
--Michael Delahoyde
Delahoyde, Michael. "Medieval Dragons and Dinosaur Films." Popular Culture Review 9.1 (February 1998): 17-30.