Jews, Gentiles, Men, Women... and Monsters
Channel: British Library
Date: 2020-12-03

Hideous, hybrid and monstrous beings have terrified and intrigued people for millennia. Though sometimes discounted as ‘merely decorative’, these monsters and monstrous human-hybrid creatures that appear in books created for Jews in the Middle Ages, have long remained mysterious.

In this illustrated lecture, Professor Marc Michael Epstein, interprets these strange creatures as they relate to ‘normal’ human figures in Jewish manuscripts and considers how they may represent notions of otherness and foreignness, whether of gender, religion or culture, both within and outside the medieval Jewish community.

Professor Marc Michael Epstein is Director of Jewish Studies at Vassar College in New York. He is a graduate of Oberlin College, received his PhD at Yale University, and did much of his graduate research at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Marc has written on various topics in visual and material culture produced by, for, and about Jews.