THE NORTH RIDING PROJECT

Book seven of Pliny’s Natural History gives an accounting of the wondrous people to be found in different nations, and their own unique habits and talents: the Anthropophagi like to drink from human skulls; the Abarimon have backwards-facing feet; the Ophiogenes can extract the poison from a serpent’s sting with the touch of a hand.  Each description takes the author and his own nation as the template for what is normal, and casts the rest as monstrous.  The word monster became a way of pointing to, explaining, and containing all manner of difference and excess.

Elkin/Monsters