ABSTRACT This article examines the transmission of the changeling motif—a child replaced by a demonic double—in medieval hagiographic literature. While scholars have identified changeling legends in the apocryphal Vitae of SS. Stephen, Lawrence, and Bartholomew, the article proposes the inclusion of the fourteenth-century Middle Low German poem Zeno within the medieval changeling corpus. The Zeno narrative demonstrates how changeling motifs migrated from saints’ lives to chivalric romance while preserving core narrative structures. The article conceptualizes this appropriation of hagiographic narrative conventions for secular audiences as the “hagiographesque.” It further traces the origins of medieval changeling hagiography to twelfth-century central Italy and explores the relationship between written texts and oral tradition. Drawing on manuscript, iconographic, and folkloric evidence, it shows how hagiographically influenced child-substitution narratives were transmitted, adapted, and reinterpreted across centuries, including in the form of nineteenth- and twentieth-century European ballads and prose tales.
ABSTRACT A close look at the history of an apparently secular popular culture phenomenon like Bigfoot reveals a deeply religious attempt to negotiate the boundaries of the human. Medieval images of the Wild Man have long been recognized by scholars as depictions of the human in a state of wildness, beyond the reach of civilization or the grace of God. This article locates this image in an entirely different place and period, traced from medieval Europe to the early United States. Focusing on newspapers, periodicals, and religious sources, the article analyzes the appearance of “wild people”—hair-covered, monstrous humanlike figures—in the United States before the twentieth century. This analysis shows how the meanings attached to wild people diversified along social, religious, and scientific lines during this period. These sources show that the meaning of the American wild person underwent a significant transformation during this period, from a preternatural “wonder,” an essentially medieval notion of ruptures in the order of nature, to a scientific anomaly: a missing link or a hidden primate.
ABSTRACT Trees are linked to early modern conceptions of witchcraft, most notably as designated sites of the witches’ Sabbath. Yet the additional roles that trees play in witchcraft imagery have received little scholarly attention. This article examines the multifaceted roles of trees in European and North American visual culture from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, arguing that trees function not merely as passive scenery but as vital components imbued with expressive, practical, and symbolic force. Drawing on a diverse array of media—including book illustrations, sheet music covers, prints, paintings, and photographs—this study explores three configurations: barren trunks as silent witnesses to violence and death, trees as platforms for musicians above the Sabbath’s revelers, and anthropomorphic trees as analogues or avatars of witches themselves. By analyzing the motif of the solitary tree, the article offers a new perspective on the enduring association between witches and forest settings in the cultural imagination.
ABSTRACT The article explores Mark Fisher’s concepts of the Weird and the Eerie as interpretive tools for unsettling experiences in both cultural texts and lived contexts. Building on Sigmund Freud’s Uncanny and Rudolf Otto’s Numinous, it situates Fisher’s framework within psychoanalytic, philosophical, and anthropological debates, incorporating Slavoj Žižek, hauntology, and ritual theory. Case studies from Greek urban folklore and contemporary ritual practice demonstrate how the Weird and the Eerie manifest in architecture, liminal spaces, and ceremonial encounters. Through theoretical elaboration and autoethnographic reflection, the article highlights the adaptability of Fisher’s categories for understanding estrangement, presence, and absence in contemporary cultural life.
ABSTRACT Popular anthologies of British folklore suggest regional diversity in magical water beings, for example, potentially benevolent fairy brides in Welsh tales as opposed to dangerous monsters throughout England. This article explores this apparent variation through mapping recorded tales of water beings across England, Wales, and Scotland. While positively portrayed beings occur mainly in the west of Britain, beings portrayed as hostile appear to be ubiquitous. Two approaches are taken to provide speculative explanations: first, a historical interpretation, considering medieval and postmedieval migration of motifs in light of Barry Cunliffe’s proposed historical Atlantic and North Sea cultural spheres; second, a psychogeographic approach, interpreting regional variations in folklore as expressions of differing practical and emotional interactions with the nonhuman environment in different social, geographical, and historical contexts. To illustrate that this affective relationship between story, landscape, and psychology is ongoing, differences are noted between present-day popular associations of water beings with Welsh and Scottish cultural identities.
ABSTRACT This article examines the narrative of Bede’s tale of Caedmon within the broader tradition of rhetorical myths that depict preternatural encounters, arguing that the tale is part of a generic continuum extending from antiquity into the medieval period. Previous scholarship has often sought analogues to Caedmon, identifying similar narratives without rigorously analyzing the nature of analogy itself. By defining analogy within the framework of classical rhetoric, this article situates Caedmon as an extension of rhetorical myths that use preternatural interventions to convey rhetorical counsel. Bede’s narrative, like earlier myths, serves to advise rhetorical theory, reflecting an Augustinian interest in the intersection between human and divine space. Through a detailed examination of the narrative’s topological and teleological features, the article posits that Caedmon is part of a larger rhetorical tradition that has shaped the articulation of abstract rhetorical concepts through preternatural experiences.
This article focusses on the unidentified marine monster called the serra, which appears in multiple medieval sources. It argues that the serra should be viewed as a compilation of knowledge about several water-borne animals. It further demonstrates the influences of Christianity and of Islamic culture upon the serra's representations. In the conclusion, the article identifies potential fields for further investigation, which can improve our knowledge of the medieval perceptions of nonhuman animals.
While the sea monsters in ancient Greek and Roman art and literature firmlybelong tothe supernatural sphere, these sources were probably inspired in part by the natural world. There are convincing arguments to suggest multiple sources of inspiration, which with few exceptions derive from the animal kingdom. Different scholars have touched upon the question of which species might have inspired the ancient imagination, from whales and sharks to snakes and dogs to fossils of long-extinct megafauna. This article is an attempt to add one more possible species: the Mediterranean moray (Muraena helena). Moray eels have double jaws-pharyngeal jaws constitute a "second set" of sharp teeth-and descriptions of sea monsters in the ancient literature emphasize not just a double but a triple set of teeth. Moreover, the moray eel has a serpentine shape, a common feature of sea monsters. Also, it is a fiercely territorial species, commonly lurking in holes, not unlike the sea monsters of myth abiding in caves.
Statius's epic poem the Thebaid abounds with eerie, ominous landscapes, as befits a text revolving around that which is nefas ("impious crime"). Statius utilizes fog in several of these landscapes as a means by which to indicate a breaking down of reality and morality through human moral pollution. Fog alters the space: It impairs the senses, defamiliarizes that which was known, and threatens a descent into chaos. Almost from the poem's outset, Statius crafts such an effect through Tisiphone utilizing her "customary mist" to corrupt the house of Cadmus: a catalyst for the catastrophic events of the rest of the poem. This corruptive mist resumes in book five, with the narrative of the Lemnian women's massacre of their men situated on a fog-covered Lemnos. Finally, the pollution of the river Ismenos in book nine stems from the fog of the ghosts of those slain clogging the waters.
In the Greco-Roman worldview, the sea forms a permeable boundary between the realms of humans, the gods, and the dead. This article demonstrates that seabirds embody the connective role of the sea in Greco-Roman mythology. Seabirds nest on land, feed by diving into water, and fly in the air. Therefore, these birds are imagined connecting the world of mortals with that of the dead and the gods, and they illustrate the transitions humans live through in their interactions with the gods and their experience of death.
The article examines the symbolism of water and fire in the Byzantine romance Velthandros, focusing on a supernatural "river of fire" (flogopotamon). This river serves as a literal and metaphorical conduit, transporting the protagonist, Velthandros, from historical reality into a mythical realm. This study argues that the fiery river alludes to ancient traditions of the search for the Nile's source, a quest associated with intellectual and spiritual discovery. The spectral presence of the Nile in the Byzantine flogopotamon interconnects themes of self-agency, emotional intelligence, and spiritual enlightenment. Linking Velthandros's journey to explorations of the Nile situates Velthandros within classical tradition and enriches its interpretation with ancient epistemologies of wisdom.
In Greco-Roman Egypt diviners used a wide variety of materials to facilitate communication between themselves and the otherworldly beings they sought knowledge from. One of the most readily accessible, and thus prevalent, materials used for this purpose was water. Through comparative examination of primary texts, this article provides new insights into the roles and functions attributed to water in the context of divination and explores how the diviners' perceptions of this everyday material served to underpin their methodological and material choices. Further linking the contexts of divination and magic, these perceptions of water demonstrated a practical application of key tenants in magical thinking combined with the existing religious understandings of their world. As scholarly interest in materiality continues to increase in the study of antiquity, this new exploration of water aims to encourage further study of divination's varied materiality as a new avenue through which to explore this well-examined practice.
