On Thursday, October 28, 2021 at 11:04:00 AM UTC-7, a425couple wrote:
> from
> https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/why-dragons-dominated-the-landscape-of-medieval-monsters-180978939/
>
> (Going to the citation to see the paintings
> might be worthwhile.)
>
> Why Dragons Dominated the Landscape of Medieval Monsters
> The mythical beasts were often cast as agents of the devil or demons in
> disguise
>
> David M. Perry and Matthew Gabriele
> October 27, 2021
> Illustration of medieval dragons and saints
>
> During the Middle Ages, dragons more often figured in accounts about the
> lives of saints and religious figures than stories of heists and
> adventures. Photo illustration by Meilan Solly / Photos via Wikimedia
> Commons and British Library under public domain
>
> The dragon resting on its golden hoard. The gallant knight charging to
> rescue the maiden from the scaly beast. These are images long associated
> with the European Middle Ages, yet most (all) medieval people went their
> whole lives without meeting even a single winged, fire-breathing
> behemoth. Dragons and other monsters, nights dark and full of terror,
> lurked largely in the domain of stories—tales, filtered through the
> intervening centuries and our own interests, that remain with us today.
>
> As Halloween approaches, we’re naturally thinking about scary stories.
> Though horror today is most often about entertainment—the thrill of the
> jump scare or the suspense of the thriller—it hasn’t always been that
> way. In the European Middle Ages, monster stories served as religious
> teaching tools, offering examples of what not to do, manifestations of
> the threats posed by the supernatural and the diabolical, and metaphors
> for the evil humans do to one another.
>
> Medieval people told tales about all kinds of monsters, including
> ghosts, werewolves and women who turned into serpents on Saturdays. But
> dragons held a special place in both the modern imagination and the
> medieval one. As historian Scott Bruce, editor of the newly released
> Penguin Book of Dragons, explains, dragons in the medieval mindset stood
> “as the enemies of humankind, against which we measure the prowess of
> our heroes.” As such, they were neatly and easily folded into Christian
> tradition, “often cast … as agents of the devil or demons in disguise.”
>
> Preview thumbnail for 'The Penguin Book of Dragons
> The Penguin Book of Dragons
> Two thousand years of legend and lore about the menace and majesty of
> dragons, which have breathed fire into our imaginations from ancient
> Rome to "Game of Thrones"
> BUY
>
> Over the past few years, Bruce, a historian at Fordham University, has
> developed wide-ranging expertise in how medieval people talked about
> monsters. In 2016, he published The Penguin Book of the Undead, and in
> 2018, The Penguin Book of Hell. Collections of texts from the ancient,
> medieval and early modern worlds, these books allow readers to see for
> themselves how people from the past thought about things that went bump
> in the night. According to Bruce, one of the reasons he collaborated
> with Penguin on the series is that he wanted to make “these fascinating
> themes … accessible to general readers,” demonstrating that monsters of
> the past are not the same as modern ones.
>
> Why Dragons Dominated the Landscape of Medieval Monsters
> Illuminated manuscript featuring Saint Marina and the dragon Public
> domain via Wikimedia Commons
> Though they sometimes appeared as foes to be overcome in valiant single
> combat, dragons in the European Middle Ages more often figured in
> accounts about the lives of saints and religious figures than stories of
> heists and adventures. In the sixth century, for example, French bishop
> and poet Venantius Fortunatus wrote about a bishop of Paris named
> Marcellus, who, in front of the gathered citizens of the city, drove off
> a dragon that had devoured a sinful noblewoman’s corpse. The bishop
> bonked the dragon on the head three times, led it through Paris on a
> leash, then banished it back to the forest so it would never trouble the
> city again.
>
> Similarly, the Byzantine historian Michael Psellos wrote in the 11th
> century of a dragon that tormented Saint Marina. Thrown in jail and
> tortured by a Roman official who wanted to sexually violate her, Marina
> encountered a demon in the form of a dragon. The monster threatened her,
> ignored her prayers and swallowed her whole. Undeterred, writes Bruce,
> Marina “made the sign of holy Christ, and, as this sign went down ahead
> of the rest of her, they ruptured the dragon’s innards. … [H]e was split
> asunder and died.”
>
> Dragons could also embody, in scales and fire, the defeated menace of
> paganism, as was the case with Saint George. A third-century military
> saint from the eastern Mediterranean, George supposedly slew his dragon
> in the Roman province of Libya in North Africa. For later Christians,
> this monster represented the pagans of the era, threatening the virtue
> of Christian maidens only to be defeated by the knight. By the time
> dragon-slaying became the most commonly portrayed element of his story,
> during the High Middle Ages, George‘s battle was also used to talk about
> contemporary Western knighthood and conflicts between Christians and
> Muslims. The saint was heavily invoked, for example, by the Latin
> Christians who took Jerusalem in 1099.
>
> Why Dragons Dominated the Landscape of Medieval Monsters
> Bernat Martorell, Saint George Killing the Dragon, 1435 Public domain
> via Wikimedia Commons
>
> Thus the monsters of the medieval era are simultaneously natural and
> supernatural, both metaphors and more than that. Venantius’ dragon is a
> creature of the forest, while Psellos’ dragon is another form of a
> demon. George’s dragon embodies the church’s very human enemies. In each
> case, these dragons are part of the landscape—a danger to be confronted,
> or at least pondered, in everyday life. Medieval people weren’t more
> superstitious or credulous than modern ones. For people of the past,
> however, monster stories weren’t just about being scary. They were
> moralizing tales that held warnings and lessons for Christians hoping to
> achieve salvation.
>
> In this way, perhaps our own modern world is not so different. In
> Venantius’ story, the dragon haunts a tomb as a (super)natural
> punishment for the deceased’s sins, offering a warning that those sins
> will be known. Psellos’ dragon appears in a prison, a supernatural
> manifestation of danger posed to Marina by the government official. And
> George’s dragon patrols the borderlands of the civilized world,
> representing the dangers of perceived outsiders. We in the 21st century
> have different anxieties, different boundaries drawn around us—but we
> still have monsters.
>
> Why Dragons Dominated the Landscape of Medieval Monsters
> Paolo Uccello, Saint George and the Dragon, circa 1470 Public domain via
> Wikimedia Commons
>
> Look again at our own scary tales, and you’ll find our deepest fears.
> Freddy Krueger lurks in our neighborhood, ready to murder our kids.
> Skynet, from the Terminator movies, is just one of many reflections of
> our fear of machines taking over. The Demogorgon, a monster from the
> Netflix series “Stranger Things,” emerges from secret government
> experiments. As “Monster Theory” scholar Jeffrey Jerome Cohen once
> asked, “Do monsters really exist? Surely they must, for if they did not,
> how could we?”
>
> Monsters, both medieval and modern, are indeed a part of our everyday
> lives. We wonder along with Venantius if someone can be forgiven for the
> harm they’ve done to others in their life, how we can reckon with the
> consequences of those actions after the sinners have died. Like Psellos,
> we can understand the torment and inner strength of a young woman
> suffering abuse at the hands of a powerful man. That common humanity,
> the one that creates monsters to terrify, as well as the one that has to
> face those monsters, is what fascinate us as historians, that led us to
> tell similar stories (admittedly with only one dragon) in our
> forthcoming book. The monsters we see in our imagination, as well as the
> monsters that will be knocking on our doors this Halloween, are
> ultimately versions of ourselves.
>
> Preview thumbnail for 'The Bright Ages: A New History of Medieval Europe
> The Bright Ages: A New History of Medieval Europe
> A lively and magisterial popular history that refutes common
> misperceptions of the European Middle Ages, showing the beauty and
> communion that flourished alongside the dark brutality—a brilliant
> reflection of humanity itself.
>
> BUY
> David M. Perry | | READ MORE
>
> David M. Perry is a freelance journalist covering politics, history,
> education, and disability rights. He was previously a professor of
> medieval history at Dominican University from 2006-2017.
>
> Matthew Gabriele | | READ MORE
>
> Matthew Gabriele is a professor of medieval studies and chair of the
> Department of Religion & Culture at Virginia Tech. His latest book,
> co-authored with David M. Perry, is The Bright Ages: A New History of
> Medieval Europe (Harper, December 2021). See more at profgabriele.com

(Recent Youtube upload):

DRAGONS: History, Mythology, Meaning