I, monster: queerness and the Liber Monstrorum in early medieval St Gall

Abstract

This article analyses a ninth-century copy of the Liber monstrorum from St Gall in which the first monster, a ‘human of both sexes’, speaks in the first person. The scribe also put the Liber monstrorum into dialogue with Isidore of Seville’s Etymologiae, in which Isidore argued that monsters were not ‘contrary to nature’. Combined with an ambiguously gendered depiction of Christ added to the Liber monstrorum by a later user, this suggests that there were some in early medieval St Gall who saw being ‘of both sexes’ – which could be interpreted to reflect same-sex attraction, and/or non-binary, intersex, and trans identities – as natural, even potentially Christ-like.