Monstrosity and ethnography in Medieval Europe : Britain, France, Iceland : a thesis in comparative literature

This dissertation examines ways in which the encyclopedic representations of "monstrous races" shaped a literary discourse of ambivalence towards race in selected texts that were used for transmitting geographic, social, and historical knowledge during the Middle Ages. Discourses and typologies of monstrosity became a foundational convention of imagining cultural identity in medieval Europe, as concepts of "race" (or "ethnicity") and "nation" emerged as distinct, albeit fluid and permeable, and almost always contestable, categories in vernacular literatures