Why Dragons Dominated the Landscape of Medieval Monsters
The dragon resting on its golden hoard. The gallant knight charging to rescue the maiden from the scaly beast. These are images long associated with the European Middle Ages, yet most (all) medieval people went their whole lives without meeting even a single winged, fire-breathing behemoth. Dragons and other monsters, nights dark and full of terror, lurked largely in the domain of stories—tales, filtered through the intervening centuries and our own interests, that remain with us today.
Medieval people told tales about all kinds of monsters, including ghosts, werewolves and women who turned into serpents on Saturdays. But dragons held a special place in both the modern imagination and the medieval one. As historian Scott Bruce, editor of the newly released Penguin Book of Dragons, explains, dragons in the medieval mindset stood “as the enemies of humankind, against which we measure the prowess of our heroes.” As such, they were neatly and easily folded into Christian tradition, “often cast … as agents of the devil or demons in disguise.”
Over the past few years, Bruce, a historian at Fordham University, has developed wide-ranging expertise in how medieval people talked about monsters. In 2016, he published The Penguin Book of the Undead, and in 2018, The Penguin Book of Hell. Collections of texts from the ancient, medieval and early modern worlds, these books allow readers to see for themselves how people from the past thought about things that went bump in the night. According to Bruce, one of the reasons he collaborated with Penguin on the series is that he wanted to make “these fascinating themes … accessible to general readers,” demonstrating that monsters of the past are not the same as modern ones.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/why-dragons-dominated-the-landscape-of-medieval-monsters-180978939/
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