Memories of the marvelous. The representation of monsters and fantastic creatures in colonial Europe

Abstract

Starting in the Middle Ages, the marvelous included unknown and mysterious creatures living in unexplored places. They were referred to as monsters and belonged to a dimension halfway between fantasy and reality. The understanding and description of these creatures gradually changed as a result of the colonization in the 19th century, when they became part of the colonial imaginary of Western explorers (Surdich, 2003). Gabrielli has suggested that the colonial imaginary of Africa reinterpreted some stereotypes of the Middle Ages. It developed a «duality between positive and negative: history-nature, technological-primitive, religion-superstition» (Gabrielli, 1998, p. 25). The present paper provides a critical assessment of the changes which occurred in the 19th-century colonial imagery. It focuses on how the representation of monsters evolved and investigates into history of imaginary, understood as a cultural history of education (De Giorgi, 2004, p. 265).