Rebecca Rideal: Welcome to Challenging Histories with Dr. Amy Fuller. In today's episode, I'm talking to Dr. Siraika Davis, a historian whose research is focused on the history of Europe's encounters with the Americas, the history of cartography, environmental thought, and what the idea of the monster can tell us about humanity. Her latest book, Humans A Monstrous History, came out last year. Welcome to the podcast, Sireka. Thank you for having me. So you have defin ⁓ defined monsters as category breakers. Can you explain what this means? Certainly. Well, imagine that a werewolf, a cyborg, and a serial killer walk into a bar. Wow. What are what are we all gonna scream? Fire? No. Monsters? Well, we might. And so, you know, what is it that werewolves, cyborgs, and serial killers have in common? They all break the category of the kind of human or the category of normal in terms of the social contract of behavior. Werewolves are half wolves, cyborgs are half machines, serial killers have broken the social contracts. And so what I do in Humans and Monstrous History is trace the idea of human by looking at where people have drawn the boundaries between human and other beings, like animals or cyborgs or gods. How they've defined where the boundaries are between social categories. So how do you invent men, women, races, and nations? You tell stories about where they join on that continuum of humanity. And finally, how do we think about the parameters normal for an individual person? Words like giant, freak, genius, even Olympian, they're all stories about category breakers. And so, you know, I use that very ancient definition of monster, which can be nasty, neutral, or nice, and trace that through to the present. Thank you for that. That's a really nice introduction to what you do. Now, often when we look at medieval and early modern maps, we can see illustrations on them of strange beings. Why do you think historians who have studied medieval and early modern maps Have been so resistant to the idea that these monstrous beings depicted on the maps might have some deep meaning or are worth researching in their own right. And what has your research helped to show us about these depictions? ⁓ I can't help but, you know, start with a really weird thing that happened to you about ten years ago at the Folger Shakespeare Library. So this is a setting full of medieval and early modern historians. And I was at a work in progress seminar where, you know, the scholar speaking showed a map from the sixteenth century which included some marine animals on it. They weren't the direct subject of her talk, but they were there and people were attracted to them. And during the QA there were various comments about these sea monsters, about how they were made up and how they were superstitious. And I thought, ⁓ here we go again. Here's that language of fable and superstition being attached to 16th century printed images. And one of the things people found extraordinary was that there was a whale with big eyes and eyelashes on this print. And I said, now wait a minute, whales are mammals and they have eyelashes, so what's the problem? And I tried to show how words like decoration and fantasy and myth, they're not analytical categories. People aren't coming to this word having done analysis. That's a value judgment based on their emotions. And people kind of tolerated me and the conversation moved on. But then at the end of the seminar, as everybody was leaving, someone came up to me and asked me to explain again why I thought those whales were just illustrations, just natural history images. And as I started to explain, he said, stamped his foot. ⁓ my god. And he yeah, he stamped his foot and then said, But that whale has two spouts. And he marched off. And I thought, well, I don't think that's a problem. And I started to Google on my phone, how many spouts? And what do you know? Some whales do indeed have two spouts, and other whales have one. So what was it about this sixteenth century image that made all of these people with humanities? degrees so sure that it was made up. And I guess my answer is that we have an idea about what real images look like that come from the age of photography. I mean we're all younger than photography as as a technology. We're used to images that appear in magazines like National G Geographic. But of course if you think a bit more about that, there are deep sea creatures that are as extraordinary as any Hollywood movie monster you could think of. So I think that that emotion is driven by a myth of modernity. What does a scientific image look like? And sixteenth century images of people or animals, you know, part of what they look like is stylistic conventions, very specific diagrammatic conventions, which we have today as well. I mean, electrons don't look the way they look in a science textbook today. We have diagrammatic codes and you learn them as a student. So there's a lack of visual vocabulary and even for experts who are very good at thinking historically about words, they don't realize they're not thinking historically about images. And their judgment of things as fantasy is driven entirely by affect, entirely by how these images make them feel. And I think the reason these images look fantastic to them is tied to these subconscious myths of modernity. What does modern science look like? And what does rationality look like? And you know, images require their own kind of methodology to understand. And at the same time, art history, which is where there's great methodology for studying images, has traditionally focused on images that look quote unquote beautiful. So their objects, the objects from which they built the meth method, are not those made by sixteenth century printers who weren't named artists. Yeah, that's it's interesting, isn't it, how people and historians in particular have spent so long focusing on words and so little has been done. And and every time it seems I remember reading your article about ⁓ becoming a monster in the archive and how, you know, often historians if they're doing something new, will become a category breaker and become a monster themselves. And so often new forms of history are rubbished as I remember quite a long time ago, I don't want to say how long ago, while I was doing my PhD and people were starting to study things like food and various other categories of history. And I remember some dusty professors just rubbishing it, you know, ⁓ why would you st ⁓ well, why would you not? Why would you not? Also women, you know, it's like why are you studying women always women? Why wouldn't you? And it is usually women that do these new categories as well. So on that note of kind of encountering slightly hostile academics, you have trained as both a scientist and a historian, and you have said that his scientists have things to learn from historians. Can you elaborate on this? And I am ⁓ especially interested in the experiences that you've had. with scientists speculating about future encounters with extraterrestrials. Sure. ⁓ well I guess it it all began when I spent my childhood watching the Muppet Show and Star Trek, especially Star Trek Next Generation. So I went up to university to become a theoretical physicist because I wanted to be, you know, Captain Picard. But by the end of the first year, you know, when we'd all taken, you know, quantum mechanics, it was clear to me that well there isn't going to be warp drive in my time. So why am I doing this? I won't even go camping. I don't want to be in some horrible little pod. And so by year two, everybody who watched too much TV had like defected from, you know, biology from watching too much Jacques Cousteau and physics from watching too much sci-fi. And I became a historian of science. But, you know, I had spent a couple of years in the end around scientists and really interested in that. potential encounter between humans and extraterrestrials. And I comforted myself with the thought that well, if aliens do ever land, it will be people who've studied cultural encounters who they need to talk to, not people who sat in labs doing physics. And so again, ten years ago, again in Washington, DC, this time in the Library of Congress, when I was finishing my first book, I happened to attend this astrobiology conference simply because it was downstairs. in the same building and they invited all the fellows to come in if they wanted to. And one of the panels was about how we would prepare just in case alien pathogens spread and made people sick, or if aliens made contact and they were hostile. And the whole panel was full of scientists talking about weapons, weapons, weapons. And so I asked this question, you know, look, if if it's going to be a kind of encounter between humans at and Aliens, whether they're germs or you know, people with spaceships, the risks aren't limited to risks the extraterrestrials may pose. There are also risks that societies will pose f because of the ways in which they react. You know, what if people panic? What if they're traumatized by the thought that their religion turns out to be wrong? What if there's looting? And the chair of the panel just cut me off and said, that's the wrong question. And I thought. Well, no, actually. You are entirely wrong. Or you la are clueless if you think preparing for discovery is merely about coming up with bigger weapons to blow up more things? You know, how how would humanity, you know, cope if they are, for example, enslaved? How might we build resistance and resilience? How might we work together as a team if there's a pandemic created by extraterrestrial pathogens. And and that's when I realized, well actually I have things to say to policymakers working on the present and even thinking about hard science. And what I have to say comes from studying the pre-modern world. And you know what? We had a pandemic and it was clear that science alone was not going to save us. We even had the miracle, as it were, of a vaccine within a year. But messaging and propaganda and the weaponization of stories about science for political ends have all fed into things like vaccine hesitancy, not to mention vaccine inequality. So it it's getting very clear to me that maths is not enough. And of course I'm relatively unusual being being a hardcore historian type, who is not afraid of numbers and sure as hell isn't afraid of people who work with numbers. And actually just One last thing to add to that is as we look at the effects of generative AI companies and AI surveillance on the world, what I see again is a certain dynamic between people who do numbers and people who do words. Yes. And, you know, in the West at least, that's that's very gendered. You know, this there are these stereotypes which are wrong about how you know, boys are good at maths and girls are good at numb at languages. People who can't do maths are intimidated by maths, but people who can't do words but can do maths are more likely to just disparage language. And so here we are, you know, people who understand people and who understand language and the relationship between humanity and thought and emotion and society in words are being cut out of existentially significant questions and policies around the way our words and data is collected, weaponized, and then turned into answer shaped objects that aren't actually answers based on stolen information in generative AI systems. Yeah. No, it's quite terrifying, isn't it? And the humanities as a whole being rubbished when the whole point of the humanities is being able to think critically and read critically and that just feeds into if if we lose that ability, you are susceptible to believing everything that AI creates and it is like taking the human out of it, isn't it? On a different note. Could you explain Mapamundi to us? And can you can we talk about how these maps incorporate scripture with monster theory? And we'll obviously They end up leading us down quite a dark path, really. Indeed. So Mahemundi are are simply the word for medieval maps, a certain kind of medieval map that had a Christian worldview and mapped the world with Jerusalem in the center. East would be at the at the top of the map, and so you have ⁓ the earth laid out in a circle that way. So once you get to you know, the Middle Ages and and, you know, you know, Christian kingdoms in Europe, what you have is is a an inheritance of Roman and Greek and Near Eastern thought, on top of which you have, you know, Christianity laid and this is how they they think of the world. So Christian thinkers inherited ancient ideas about human bodies in space. So supposedly the body was malleable, and if you moved to different places where the climate was different, your body and even your temperament would change. Now in theory, for the ancient Greeks and Romans, at the edges of the earth, where the climate was very harsh, bodies and minds were basically monstrified and you would have what they called monstrous peoples at the edges of the earth. Now when Christian thinkers looked at, you know, the ancient texts they they had to kind of square that with Christianity. So if there are monstrous peoples, well, why are they there? What does the Bible say? And there are a couple of examples. One was that they were the descendants of Cain, who had killed his brother Abel. Another possibility was that they were the descendants of Ham, who had been punished for laughing at Noah when he was in the ark and inebriated. So when the the flood waters subsided, Noah divided the world among his sons, so that's Shem, Ham, and Japheth, and supposedly Ham's descendants carry the mark of his sin. And this was a an idea that would later feed into the kind of rationale for people of African descent being, you know, meant to be enslaved by by people in Europe. And We also have from here, do we get an indication of kind of racist thought surrounding geography and climate in particular? Yes, indeed. ⁓ so if we go back again to to classical antiquity, you know, th you know, someone like the naturalist Pliny the Elder, you know, talked about there being monstrous peoples in climates that were very harsh. And climates that were very different from Southern Europe, which was supposedly Place with the best climate for people. Is that where he was from by any chance? What do you know? It was indeed. So, I mean, even the British Isles were seen as somewhere quite cold and nasty. And I think that's gonna be one way in which, you know, writers in Britain processed the anxiety of being on the edge of the world in the Middle Ages, as it were, was by drawing and writing about monsters. So anyway, so what you have in, say, fifteenth century Europe is that ancient thinking about how if you go far enough there will be people who've been monsterified by their climate. But of course once you start circumnavigating the earth and settling in places that are v very cold or very hot, that does beg the question, have we crossed the boundary between human space and monster space? And if our bodies are malleable, are we going to become monsters? Or or our Are our descendants going to become monsters? And so there are consequences potentially for colonial projects of bodies being malleable. And so what you find is people coming up with with new stories to explain how, ⁓ it's okay if you come from Europe, there'll be a certain amount of seasoning as you adapt to, for example, you know, a Caribbean climate. But you will contain within you an essence of where you came from. So there was this kind of existential reason to you know, invent, you know, something that was supposedly in the body from before you crossed the Atlantic, even before there was an economic reason to say, well, Europeans are like this, Africans are people we're going to enslave. But there was also language about how Africans were supposedly more physically capable of working in the hot climate of the Circum Caribbean region, where of course many, many indigenous people were dying of the old world diseases that, you know, also came on those ships. When you talk about malleable bodies, what kind of things were they worried could influence one really can striking thing for me was how, you know, Christians in Europe worried about whether they would be able to keep communion properly if they couldn't make bread out of wheat. Yes. There's no wheat. And they couldn't make wine out of grapes. You know, can you actually do the whole kind of Eucharist transubstantiation, you know, process if you've got the wrong stuff? So there was that spiritual worry. But also one of the ways in which bodies supposedly changed in different environments was because people ate different stuff. And so in the Spanish Empire, for example, where you had a a a lot of intermarriage, a lot of intermixing of indigenous and Spanish populations. There was in the way, ultimately you couldn't you couldn't look at people and know what their ancestry was any more than you can truly tell that today. But people worried that if you had the quote unquote wrong practices, you would, you know, your actual, you know, mind and body would also become say kind of less Spanish. So in the absence of ways to actually police a continuum, the ways in which you acted, what you ate, what you dressed, were ways to kind of try and figure out whether someone was being properly Christian. We seem to see a lot more women being monsters perhaps than men. I don't know. Is that especially during pregnancy? And in terms of talking about anxieties, is the potential for monster making during pregnancy all about men's anxieties about their lack of control in that area? Or is it just plain old misogyny? I think there are several reasons why people were anxious about the potential of a pregnant woman to give birth to a monster. And I think nobody had any idea like what was going on during pregnancy. And sometimes someone would give birth to a child who was relatively unusual looking in physical features, you know, maybe can are very disabled or have, you know, for example, an atypical number of limbs. And then the question becomes, well, why did this happen? And there were various reasons given for like one-off unusual births. One was that this, you know, child was a punishment from God. Another that it but this was just an accident. You know, nature sometimes made mistakes or even played jokes. Or thirdly, it could be that the woman's imagination had worked on the fetus. ⁓ and this is where the kind of fear of women's power becomes like one of the things driving explanations for an unusual birth. Apparently, what a woman was thinking about during sex or even who she had sex with could be revealed in the appearance of the fetus. And of course this is a time when you couldn't test for paternity, you know, in the biological sense. Paternity was merely a social contract construct. You couldn't know that a child really was yours, apart from if they looked, I suppose, exactly like you and you had their siblings or some such. The way in which people told stories about monstrous births, as they're sometimes called, is tied up with the kind of complete lack of agency that someone might have over how even their own child might turn out. They could almost commit adultery in the imagination. Was this simply a face saving way to explain why a child didn't look like a father? Perhaps. Yeah, that's really interesting. Would you say Generally speaking, are women more likely to be monstropied than men? And can you please tell us about the story of Grendel's mother? ⁓ 'cause when I was reading your book, I you know, she's always depicted as a monster, but I'm not a early English ⁓ historian and so I I I I'm not an expert on Beowulf by any Stretch. But I always imagined she was a monster because that's how she's always presented. But you tell us that she's not actually that's been made up. Tell us all about this, please. Well, indeed. Yes, I think women are more likely to be monstrified simply because, you know, the category of has been shaped by the patriarchy. You know, we're supposed to be lesser in all kinds of ways and not, you know, try to be leaders or have as much agency historically. And so the the story of Grendel's mother, you know, in the old English saga, Beowulf, is is is fascinating because it's not just a s a monster story, but it's a story about what happens when stories are translated. the kind of Beowulf saga is a thousand years old, and the earliest version surviving was is in two hands. So they're two different people even like writing into it and you know, the the kinds of mistakes they make are different. And many of the translations that became standard came out in the 19th century. And there are words used to describe Grendel's mother in the in these 19th century translations that basically dehumanize Grendel's mother compared to the original. And just quickly for anyone who's not familiar with the story, in a Scandinavian castle there turns out that there's this terrible monster, Grendel Grendel Who comes and attacks and eats people every night. And in the end, this noble Beowulf sets out with a bunch of warriors to kill Grendel, which they manage to do. But then Grendel's mother, ⁓ you know, is the kind of the new kind of arch-enemy who is now determined to avenge her son's death. And in the original text, There are some descriptions of Grendel's mother's appearance, and she's basically like a warrior. And there's a very recent translation from about 2020 by the novelist Maria Devana Headley, which is kind of wonderful. She she rewrites the Beowulf story, pulling away some of the, you know, sexist translation language that crept in a couple of hundred years ago. And, you know, one of the ways in which people have chosen to translate. Grenola's mother in such a way as to monstrify her is to translate her fingers, the word is fingerum, into the word clause. You know, another example is there's a there's a word for warrior, and then there's a female version of that word. And the female vers version of the word for warrior appears in the text, but instead of translating it as warrior, what one translator translated it as is a wretch or monster of a woman. If a warrior or a hero if the word is hero in here for if a man is doing a thing, then why is a woman a monster for doing the same action which is being able to, you know, fight and being strong and I mean that is in a way a p still timeless way in which women and men are treated differently, where a man would be a leader or a hero, a woman is bossy or a nasty woman. Yeah. This is why one I think translation is a is a vital skill and it's some it's a relationship that a human being has with the potential readers of the work of another human being, you know, the the book they're translating. And it's not something that can just be done with a machine and be correct because words have multiple meanings and there are choices to make and and and, you know, an ethics to making those choices. So On a on a different note, can we talk about obviously there are certain people who do not conform to what is what has been decided to be normal. And in the past, there have been people who have decided to make this their living in so-called freak shows, making their living from people viewing them as monsters. Co could we talk about a few examples and perhaps Charles Byrne and how he's was treated in life and after life still. Sure. So there were these fairs and shows in Europe for hundreds and hundreds of years at which people with atypical bodies would turn up and perform, or else be coerced into performing. They might have been, you know, very tall or very small or not have any arms and yet be very ingenious, playing chess or writing, you know, with their hands. There were also people from overseas who were captured and then were forced to like perform their supposed lives. One example from the late eighteenth century was this Irishman called Charles Byrne, known as the Irish Giant, and he used to simply perform his height. But he left instructions for what was to happen to his body after he died. He did not want to be put on display, so he left money so that some fishermen would give him a sea burial. And then what happened when he died, you know, in his late twenties? The surgeon John Hunter bribed the fisherman to not take his bury out body out to sea, but to give it to him. And then Hunter had Burns body boiled in a cauldron, and then he put the skeleton on display, and it was on display for centuries in the Hunterian Museum in London, where I accidentally kind of came upon it. In two thousand fourteen and on the side of the case was a label telling you about Charles Byrne, how he had wanted a sea burial, didn't get it, and here I am looking at his skeleton, complicit in his lack of choice. The fact that they had that label as well is just how how just mind boggling why they would make an exhibit out of it and put that label to show that they're doing exactly what he asked not to happen to him. Exactly, exactly. Happily ⁓ Byrne's skeleton did come off display. ⁓ the museum went through a renovation and then in twenty twenty three when it opened the skeleton was no longer on display, although it has not been given a sea burial. as he asked. And ⁓ the official reason is that the skeleton is available for genuine scientific study. You know, one of the reasons Byrne died in his late twenties was his sheer size. I mean he's almost eight feet tall and at that kind of height, you know, it's a struggle, for example, for the heart to pump through the body. Is that okay or not? Well, I mean you c you could say that it's still not okay. It's Yet again, a kind of question between science versus humanity is the fact that he was, you know, extraordinary in some way, does that mean that he gets no agency? Why could I, for example, choose whatever happens to my body and would expect unless I I develop some kind of disability or disease that needs studying, you know, wh why can I say what happens to my body, but someone else can't? It's just horrific. It's a thin end of the wedge because of course other people were experimented on during their lives. Like you know Henrietta Lax is is is the famous example. So many, you know, people have, you know what happened to her? What was Henrietta Lax ⁓ was an African American woman who was experimented on ⁓ in ⁓ the mid twentieth century in Baltimore the Johns Hopkins University Hotel. Some of her cancerous cells were collected without her knowledge and they turned out to be almost like cells that could survive anything. Her cells could be used to to test all kinds of things and there are her cells like all over the world now. All of the medical advances made from her cells. I mean, it was very, very recently that her, you know, family saw any benefit, if you want to even call it that. You they of reparation. They didn't have they did weren't didn't even know and they had had no opportunity to give consent and yet decades of cancer research has been done on her cells. You know, she went in for treatment over and over again and, you know, a lot of what was happening was was not to her benefit at all. That's horrible. and it seems to be the case that so many subjugated peoples are experimented on whether it be, you know, for starvation and To find out how many calories a person needs to survive. ⁓ and yeah, it's again, science. You should ask if it's if it's a good idea sometimes. ⁓ you've said that many of the worst moments in human history have at their core an urge to manage the boundaries between races and between nations. Is that something you feel is playing out at this moment? Unfortunately, yes, and you know, history clearly doesn't flow in the path of becoming more dreadful over time. It goes up and down. In the UK, you know, the rhetoric of reform, the conservatives and Labour is all rhetoric of white supremacy. There's an undercurrent and sometimes very explicit current of there's a normal way to look if you're British, which is a kind of nonsense. ⁓ I mean Cheddar Gorgeman had dark skin. I mean, he's what, ten thousand years old. People have always moved and migrated. All of us are are, you know, descended from from from people in Africa. And equally in the US, which of course as a country was founded on racism and the genocide of indigenous peoples from the beginning and of course the Atlantic slavery. And now you have this kind of new set of k ways of racially profiling people as people who couldn't possibly be American Because of what they look like. Citizenship is a is a is a is a legal category that can be fulf fulfilled in a variety of ways that legally are not actually about what your face looks like. So those worst moments of history are upon us again for sure. Yeah, that's it's it's worrying times, definitely. and it seems to be happening everywhere. It's not it's not just here, it's Britain, Europe, obviously. incredibly so in the US at the moment. So on that note, and I know this is a huge question and there's probably not a simple answer to it, but do you think there are any lessons we can learn from history on this topic that we've been discussing? And if people could take away one thing from our discussion, what would you like that to be? I think people would do well to recognise that monster making is a process of storytelling that continues to this day. So we can kind of look out and notice when individuals and groups are being storified as monsters. And that word monster may or may not appear. Where, for example, are people being dehumanized by being compared to animals? I mean phrases like human animals and even animals appears in times of war. Secondly, we can look at how entire social categories are being framed as a threat. Immigrants, for example. Supposedly they're they're all terrible. In the US supposedly, you know, all, you know, Hispanic undocumented immigrants were supposedly rapists, but hello, who are the rapists in the Epstein files? They ain't Hispanic immigrants. And also as we kind of look at transphobia around the world, people are ha having a meltdown over the possibility that there's a continuum from male to w men to women. So, you know, noticing stories told in order to separate categories. you know, like what's what's at stake here? I mean, nothing for ordinary people. You really the the real threat to women, let's say in the UK, is like thirty or forty million cis men in a time of extremism online and and and misogyny. And finally, I guess that third way of defining the the human parameters of normal, just kind of noticing when individuals are excluded or dehumanized for changing how we think about the kind of capabilities of an individual who who, you know, might be someone who's, you know, excellent at sport sport or it may be someone disabled whose ability to thrive is is not recognized or facilitated. Yeah. Thank you. What should our listeners go away and read? And obviously if anyone wants to know about the papal ass, they need to buy your book, Humans and Monstrous History. They do indeed. What could who could not want to know about the paper glass? What else should should people go away and read or listen to or watch? I would recommend Naomi Klein's recent book, Doppelganger. And the subtitle is A Trip Into the Mirror World. ⁓ wow. So it's partly a memoir about how she found that she, Naomi Klein, was being misidentified and confused online With a different Naomi, Naomi Wolf. And she really started to notice this when the pandemic first began and kind of lockdown began in twenty twenty. And the book is a s partly a st you know, what what she learned from being on the internet and looking how she was confused with someone who had, you know, very different ideas from her about, you know, reality. It's also ⁓ I mean, it's a story about how when there are legitimate things to worry about. like a pandemic or kind of collecting of our data for uses we know not what. Sometimes there are legitimate, you know, worries that people who may not know a lot about the subject have. And she shows how important it is to listen to those fears with thoughtfulness and explain the kind of facts behind it. So instead of saying to someone who's worried about vaccines, Don't be silly, just take your vaccine, to really kind of explain that, you know, the risk of not taking it is a million times worse than the tiny risk that you'll have a crummy reaction to a vaccine. So I mean it it showed me the importance of meeting people where they are and kind of explaining what's going on. At the same time, it shows you how conspiracy theories are, you know, invented or capitalized upon. by people who actually want to destroy democracy. So look at how stories are being told about how groups are monstrous, trans people, Palestinians, women, and understand how to undercut that by actually providing quality information that meets people and recognizes why they might be worried about data collection ⁓ or vaccination, as we were just been talking about. Henrietta Lax and there are communities who have good reasons to worry about people wanting to poke them with needles. Yeah, that's that's a fair point and thank you for that recommendation. Well I wish I could talk to you for longer, but it's been really wonderful to talk to you, Sarahka. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast. Thank you for having me. That's it for today. Challenging Histories is produced by Histfest Productions. Thanks to the British Academy for sponsoring this season. I've been your host, Dr. Amy Fuller. In the next episode, we'll be talking about life under Nazi rule for the LGBTQIA Plus community. Remember to rate, review and subscribe to the podcast so that other listeners can find us too. Thanks for listening.