Criss-Crossing the Channel: Isidore, Aldhelm, Thomas and All That (Monstrous) Jazz

Classical mythology, Hellenistic odeporic and teratological literature, and medieval Christian bestiaries all teemed with human-animal hybrids. This paper will focus on two such therianthropic beings, the (hippo)centaurs, half-human and half-equine, and the onocentaurs, half-human and half-asinine, as described in the Liber monstrorum de diversis generibus (henceforth LM), a teratological compendium from early eighth-century England. While the origin of centaurs and onocentaurs can be traced to times and places very distant from pre-Conquest England, they form two perfect case studies of a distinct category of monsters, namely those creatures whose monstrosity originates from a degradation of humanity or from the aberrant conjunction of the human and the bestial, which seems to have especially resonated with early English sensibility. The porosity of the boundaries between the human and the monstrous is precisely one of the most distinctive, if disturbing, traits of the LM, as well as of texts which have been closely associated with it, such as Beowulf or Aldhelm’s Aenigmata. While the immediate sources of the two LM entries on (hippo)centaurs and onocentaurs have been identified as Jerome’s Vita S. Pauli eremitae and Isidore of Seville’s Etymologiae, XI.iii.39, respectively, they in fact rely on a blend of ultimate sources. These multiple layers of sources will be explored and disentangled by also looking at Aldhelm, who has long been attributed with the authorship of the LM and dealt himself with hybrid monsters, such as the Minotaur and the centaur. In turn, Aldhelm, or rather his alter ego Adelinus, is quoted as an authoritative source on the origin of the onocentaurs in the Liber de rerum natura by Thomas of Cantimpré (c. 1201–c. 1270), an encyclopaedia which draws extensively on both Aldhelm/Adelinus and the LM. By looking both backwards and forward, this study will try to illustrate the constant process of redefinition and renegotiation of the nature of half-human, half-bestial creatures such as the centaurs and onocentaurs, their hybridity resulting in an inescapably shifting morphology, iconography and even designation. This paper also contributes to the intricate multi-layering of the sources of the LM, as well as to its positioning within western teratology and paradoxography as a key transitional text mediating between the natural history of classical and late antiquity, on the one hand, and medieval bestiaries and scholastic encyclopaedism, on the other. By doing so, I also hope to shed further light onto the persistent and prolific exchanges of books and ideas on both sides of the Channel in the early Middle Ages.