Julia C. Hernandez, New York University
That Greco-Roman accounts of wondrous or “monstrous” races at the far-flung corners of the oikumene—from giants to dog-headed cynocephaloi to headless blymmyae—shaped medieval Europeans’ conceptions of regions distant to their own may not be entirely surprising to casual observers: many modern interpreters remain primed to see a medieval “Dark Age” rather than the era of rich global interconnectedness recent scholarship has emphasized. What does prove shocking to many, however, is the persistence of these classical legends, with their roots in Herodotus, Ctesias, Strabo, and others, in text and image during the age of colonial expansion, a time often associated with nascent scientific thinking. Even as Europeans came into direct contact with global cultures unknown to the Greeks and Romans, accounts of contact with the wondrous “Plinian Races,” so named for the impact of book VII of the Naturalis historia in perpetuating their legend, continued to circulate at least into the late 18th century. For the Americas, cartographers and chroniclers continued to locate these classical figures in the continent’s remote corners, albeit with giants, acephaloi, and Amazons now re-envisioned as supposed Indigenous tribes.
Traditionally treated by scholars as fringe phenomena, curiosities, or atavisms, as per Anthony Pagden, more recently, Surekha Davies and others have centered these “monstrous” figures in exploring colonial constructions of race and human difference. In this paper, I argue that they additionally allow us to interrogate our own conceptualization of the “medieval” and “early modern,” while exploring the role of evolving technologies in shaping what constitutes the “classical tradition” at any given moment. In both text and image, these classical figures represent continuity with the medieval refraction of the world through “Plinian glasses” in the words of John Block Friedman. Paradoxically, their longevity in the era of colonization when global expansion should otherwise have proven them fantasies is directly tied to the technological innovation most frequently cited as defining “early modernity”: print. This presentation will trace what I call textuo-visual feedback loops for two of the most iconic “Plinian Races,” the giants and the acephaloi, from their ancient loci classici through their medieval incarnations to their ultimate early modern “Americanized” forms. I maintain that, due to the exponential growth of print culture from the 15th century on, rich textual and visual iconographies of these “Plinian” Amerindians proliferated, creating recursive feedback loops in which textual accounts spawned cartographic iconographies which in turn fueled more texts. Paradoxically, this “early modern” proto-viral echo chamber perpetuated “medieval” modes of engaging with classical legacies far longer than would be otherwise expected.