Throwing Shade: The One-Legged Loner of the Medieval Bestiary

Where I live, August is the death knell of summer’s heat. It is not a gentle death, no: the summer here fights the inevitable by punishing us with humidity, mosquitoes, and the occasional coastal hurricane. August is a time to seek shade. There is no monster from the medieval bestiary better suited to a Virginia summer than the sciapod.

To an illiterate society, a picture is not worth a thousand words: it is worth all of them.

The average inhabitant of medieval Europe believed monsters to live somewhere to the not-precisely-specified “East,” a location that conveniently shifted to the homeland of the tribes currently attacking any given European kingdom. Xenophobic curiosity and genuine fear of the unknown combined to popularize bestiaries, which are illuminated books picturing monsters and mythical animals. To an illiterate society, a picture is not worth a thousand words: it is worth all of them. Readers (term loosely used) did not “expect a literal text illustration, but rather visual clarification in terms familiar to him.”¹ More bluntly, “no medieval artist aimed at a descriptive illustration of a text. As a rule, he addressed his public through exemplars, models which circumscribed or contained in a single picture a whole complex of notions and ideas.”² Monsters were, effectively, tropes. Just as an American moviegoer knows what to expect from a summer blockbuster and will be disappointed if the movie deviates too far from the “norm,” so too would a medieval person be disappointed with a bestiary that does not have the expected monsters.

In my research for a timeline set in the Middle Ages for my novel Aulisyn, I encountered many strange monsters. For me, no other monster held more fascination than the sciapod, the one-legged man. I say “man” on purpose, as I have yet to see a female sciapod; indeed, a sciapod tends to be middle-aged, bearded man. He is depicted as striking a contorted pose, his one, huge foot positioned overhead like a five-toed umbrella. He looks lost in thought. What he is pondering is unknowable, but of the bestiary monsters, sciapods look the most philosophically inclined. He is depicted alone, or with other species of monster, and never with another sciapod. He is the brooding loner of the medieval bestiary.

---

References

Sciapod image is in the public domain and can be found on Wikimedia Commons at https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Nuremberg_chronicles_-_Strange_People_-_Umbrella_Foot_(XIIr).jpg. Credited artists are Michael Wolgemut and Wilhelm Pleydenwurff.

Footnotes 1 and 2 are both taken from Allegory and Migration of Symbols by Rudolf Wittikower, published by Thames and Hudson in 1977.