Extraordinary Bodies and Religion: Continuities and ruptures in the medieval taxonomy of bodily malformations in the works of Thomas of Cantimpré and Konrad von Megenberg

Sobkowiak, Piotr (September 2023). Extraordinary Bodies and Religion: Continuities and ruptures in the medieval taxonomy of bodily malformations in the works of Thomas of Cantimpré and Konrad von Megenberg (Unpublished). In: Under Construction. Religion als Praxis und Prozess. XXXV. Jahrestagung der DVRW. Universität Bayreuth. 25.-28.09.2023.

Published in 1350, Das Buch der Natur by Konrad von Megenberg is the first history of nature written in the German language. Konrad von Megenberg was not only an encyclopaedist working in the tradition established by Roman authors, but also, like Albertus Magnus, endeavoured his own explanation of odd things and troublesome phenomena. One of them was the existence of human beings with extraordinary bodies (Garland-Thomson 1997). For his work, Konrad von Megenberg utilised Liber de natura rerum, which, albeit erroneously attributed to Albertus Magnus, was written in 1240-41 by his student, Thomas of Cantimpré. Liber de natura rerum became the most famous medieval work on the topic written in Latin, while Konrad’s Das Buch der Natur became its counterpart in the German language. Taking up the works of Thomas of Cantimpré and Konrad von Megenberg as an example, the paper will highlight a particular rapture in the taxonomy of the human body of the late medieval period. This rapture emerged due to the failure to answer the question of whether humans considered “monstrous” came from Adam. Originating already in Augustinian theology, the “Adam’s genealogy” of so-called monstrous humans was abandoned within the emerging field of natural science in the late Medieval period. The present paper deals with the author’s ongoing historical project on the topic of extraordinary human bodies and religion. This project aims to explore the philosophical, theological, medical, and natural science discourses that, predominantly shaped by Christian tradition, established the ontology of bodily deformations within the universal genealogy of mankind as postulated in Genesis. Applying the concepts introduced within the disability studies, my aim is to highlight the historical taxonomy which was based on the image of the human body. Within this taxonomy, physically impaired people were placed outside the clear cut human category. This legitimized a specific type of social order that was based on the image of the human body.

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