From this list of monstrous attributes, one might glean what factors compose the “measure of man,” to use John Block Friedman’s phrase,28 and distinguish the human from the monstrous: physical form; modes of diet; dwelling and habitat; sexual, marital, and childbearing practices; clothing; spiritual life; speech; and defense, Pliny suggests, are each constitutive of the “human.” Pliny’s ideas would have reached medieval readers through his ancient encyclopedic abbreviators, Solinus and Isidore of Seville, as well as the thirteenth-century encyclopedist Vincent of Beauvais. Solinus’s Collectanea Rerum Memorabilium cites many of the most popular Plinian races, locating them in the farthest East or in Africa.29 Solinus describes the manners and customs of a number of peoples, including the Arabians, the silk-trading Seres, Indians abstaining from meat, the Tabrobanes and their method of king selection.30 He also offers a long ethnographic excursus on the Scythians, whom he describes in ways that will remind one of Matthew Paris’s Tartars: living in caves, Scythians drink out of the skull cups of their enemies, love fighting, suck the blood out of the wounds they inflict, and, of course, delight in drinking one another’s blood.31 Isidore lists the Plinian races under his consideration of “Portents,” where, he asserts, just as anomalous monstrous births take place among humans, so are there born whole monstrous races, including Cynocephali, Cyclopes, Blemmyas, Antipodes, Pygmies, and so forth.32
Isidore’s and Solinus’s treatment of the Plinian races may well have influenced the classifications of culture that John of Plano Carpini or William of Rubruck employed to describe the foreign Mongols before them, including their dwellings, food, clothing, laws, burial rites, marital rites, and religious beliefs—classifications that reinscribe much the same categories that serve as boundaries between the human and the nonhuman in Pliny, Solinus, and Isidore. But other cultural discourses were also available from which Carpini and Rubruck could derive those categories, including the widespread tradition of that internal other of medieval Europe, the wild man. This tradition was made available by way of the work of the great trio of thirteenth-century encyclopedists, Bartholomew Anglicus, Thomas of Cantimpré, and Vincent of Beauvais, as well as through older textual traditions such as the Alexander saga, the St. Jerome Bible, and the apocryphal Letter of Prester John (c. 1165).33 In a composite sketch of the tradition, an “ethnography of the medieval wild man”34 might look something like the following: the wild man is forest dwelling (thus a literal silvester homo) rather than a city dweller, giant or dwarflike Pygmy in size, hairy, hunting and gathering, eating the raw flesh of animals, without knowledge of agriculture or metallurgy, having great physical strength, warlike, given to sexual carnality, of meager intellect, lacking human speech, incapable of knowing God because irrational, and linked to the semidivine or the semisatanic. Such an ethnography indicates how readily one may treat the discourses of the medieval wild man and the monstrous races as coterminous, invoking as they do many of the same markers for “humanity”—habitat, diet, hunting, sexual practices, speech, religion—and each representing the projection of internal anxieties about the boundaries and norms of “human” behavior on an “other.”
Thirteenth-century intellectual production indicates still further examinations by humans of the contours of the human. Specifically in the schools, Aristotelian scholars like Albertus Magnus, Thomas Aquinas, and numerous Aristotelian commentators were openly considering the same question of the boundaries of the human that popular discourses of “wild men” and “monsters” entertained in less conscious ways.35 Indeed we even find leakage of vocabulary between scholastic and popular treatments of the topic: the Pygmy plays a pivotal role in Albertus Magnus’s determination of what sets apart the human from the rest of the animal kingdom. In De Animalibus, a text whose main concern has rightly been identified as man himself, Albertus assigns the Pygmy and the ape intermediary positions between man and beast.36 As manlike creatures, or similitudines hominis,37 the ape and the Pygmy reached closest to the perfection of man in that they were capable of degrees of disciplinabilitas, “the control of mind over body that underlies every purposeful act,”38 and thereby learning. They lacked, however, a final level of disciplinabilitas reserved for humans alone: the power of reason with which to transform these sensory data and memories into universal principles. Without ratio and the ability to grasp universals, the ape and the Pygmy were deprived of civility and its distinguishing elements, enumerated by Albertus as: the experience of shame and the ability to know vice from virtue, the use of language including a facility with rhetorical devices, political systems and laws, and non-forest dwellings.39 In his inclusion of the forest habitat as a marker of incivility, Albertus Magnus participates in the popular ethnographic assumptions of his day. But Albertus Magnus distinguishes himself from other medieval thinkers in his anticipation of the evolutionary assumptions of modern anthropology through his offering of a measure by which the animal kingdom and man himself might be assigned a position on a hierarchical chain of being, and his posing of a theory of man’s kinship with apes.40
But what of degrees of humanity within humans themselves? Albertus Magnus’s treatments of the less than human in the De Animalibus closely echo his definitions of “the barbarian” elsewhere. In the Ethics, he writes: “Bestial men, however, are rare, since it is a rare man who has no spark of humanity. It does, however, occur, and usually from two causes: physical handicap and deprivation. For we call those who are not induced to be virtuous either by laws, by civility or by the regime of any kind of discipline ‘barbarous.’ Cicero, in the beginning of the De Inventione, calls them ‘wild men leading the life of animals with the wild beasts’.… Or, in the same way, bestial men eat raw flesh and drink blood, and are delighted to drink and eat from human skulls.”41 Albertus Magnus’s barbarians are men who lead the life of animals, who cannot be induced to civility and virtue by “the regime of any kind of discipline,” discipline being linked, as we’ve seen, to reason. His final depiction of barbarians feeding on raw flesh, drinking blood, and eating out of human skulls resonates with Matthew Paris’s description of Mongol life so closely as to make apparent to what degree each followed the barbarian script—already fully developed in Solinus’s account of the Scythians42—and how much agreement there was among an array of thirteenth-century thinkers on the nature of humanity’s other, the barbarian. When another great scholastic, Thomas Aquinas, depicted barbarians as “for the most part … robust in body and deficient in mind” and as “lacking in reason” in the Commentary on the Politics, he cannot be regarded as original. While Thomas offered some specificity for the causes of barbarian irrationality, his definition of the barbarian will be otherwise familiar:
and so the men who are called barbarians absolutely are the ones who are lacking in reason, either because they happen to live in an exceedingly intemperate region of the sky, so that by the very disposition of the region they are found to be dull for the most part, or else because of some evil custom prevailing in certain lands from which it comes about that men are rendered irrational and almost brutal. Now it is evident that it is from the power of reason that men are ruled by reasonable laws and that they are practiced in writing. Hence barbarism is appropriately manifested by this sign, that men either do not live under laws or live under irrational ones, and likewise that among certain peoples there is no training in writing. (my italics)43
Humans are reasonable, lawful and robust in mind; barbarians are unreasonable, robust in body, lawless or ruled by irrational laws and evil customs,