Gabriela Antunes

Gabriela Antunes graduated in Linguistics and Literature (2004) and received her M.A. from the Universidade Estadual Paulista, Brazil (2006) with the thesis "Giants in Old Norse Literature". She is working towards a Ph.D. at the Université Marc Bloch in Strasbourg, France and her dissertation is entitled "Monsters in Late Medieval Literature". Her interests are Representations of the Strange, Relations between Fear and Laughter, and Demonization in the Middle Ages.

My enquiry will focus on the representation and function of monsters in the medieval literature of the late twelfth to the fourteenth centuries. While numerous representations of monsters appear in medieval texts and art, there are no clear-cut definitions of monstrosity. Monsters are not only representations of the unknown, but also allegories of sin and objects of demonization; they are part of religious discourse, and also of the literature of entertainment, travel narratives, ethnography and scientific speculation. I have selected a wide corpus from literary, historical and hagiographical sources in order to consider which creatures were considered to be monstrous, the role of physical and environmental criteria, and how monstrosity was accepted or rejected by popular faith and society. My research has an interdisciplinary approach, combining an analysis of literature and a historical view of the continuities and changes that monstrous images underwent in the medieval mentality.