Monsters Of The Mind

Dominic Green meets a collection of holy terrors, alien beings and awesome wonders at New York’s Morgan Library & Museum

 ‘The early 13th-century English theologian Thomas of Chobham wrote: ‘The Lord created different creatures with different natures not only for the sustenance of men, but also for their instruction, so that through the same creature we may contemplate not only what may be useful to the body, but also what may be useful to the soul.’ All creatures, he said, had properties that might ‘lead us to imitate God’, or ‘move us to flee from the Devil’.

And, Thomas might have added, this included creatures that emerged not from the mind of God, but from the minds of men. The allegorical fauna of the medieval bestiary ran from the prosaic to the fantastical. While the busy Bee was the model artisan and the cunning Fox the emblem of the heretic in the animal world, the Siren, the embodiment of harlotry, and the Phoenix, the winged incarnation of eternal life, were fabulous fictions.

Allegory itself drives naturalism and the imaginary image of the unnatural alike away from the natural and social world. An ‘allegory’– the word entered English from the Greek allegoría around the time that Thomas of Chobham reflected on the theological value of animals – connotes a translation of meaning from the evident to the invisible. The allegory emerges from the centre of authority, from the church or the town square; the etymology of allegoría stems from the union of allos (‘different’) and agoreuo (‘to speak in the agora’). But this different path of allegory leads away to the margins of society, morality and imagination.