You're about to wander into a world where nothing is quite what it seems, and everything is poised, at the smallest provocation, to erupt into horns, wings, or the unmistakable wheeze of drone and chanter.
Medieval Europe was itself a vast liminal space, a cosmic antechamber suspended between pagan yesterdays and Christian tomorrows.
From roughly the eighth to the fifteenth centuries, the place was crawling with misfits and general aficionados of social nonconformity; with beings who slipped restlessly between human and animal, between the consecrated and the unclean, between prayer and howl.
These were no mere decorative doodles, no quaint marginalia for art history students to coo over like a well-lit duck pond. These were the monster-musicians, shapeshifters, and enigmatic challengers. They were the incarnate jitters of the medieval mind.
Identity, transformation, and the slippery boundaries of the self all danced on their scales, feathers, and leafy cloaks. These creatures set up residence in what Michel de Certeau would have called the borderland as the space of the Other, where everything Christendom officially dreaded could be safely ogled at, and yet, in secret, adored. Like how Victorian England was positively shocked by French postcards whilst simultaneously being Europe's largest importer of them.
This was not a vacuum of imagination. Medieval artists inherited centuries of barbarian and Celtic visual traditions where animals served as vessels for violent emotion and abstract pattern. As Mederos traces, Scythian animal art from the Southern Russian steppes (with its depiction of animals 'dying or devouring each other') filtered westward through migrating tribes, merged with Celtic geometric abstraction, and eventually became embedded in Romanesque sculpture and manuscript decoration. The 'horror vacui' (the compulsive filling of every available space with writhing forms) that characterised Scythian gold-work appeared again in the drill-cut pillars at Souillac around 1130, where human and animal forms devour each other in 'a veritable jungle of twisted and writhing forms.' Medieval shapeshifters and monster-musicians weren't spontaneous eruptions of anxiety: they were the latest iteration of a tradition stretching back over a thousand years.
This inheritance wasn't passive. Germanic animal motifs (particularly the visceral image of a creature pierced and strangled by its own limbs or interlaced bands) survived the collapse of the classical world through metalwork, manuscript illumination, and the stubbornness of artistic tradition. Zarnecki (1990) traces how these motifs, originating in pagan Germanic styles, traveled through Anglo-Saxon manuscripts, appeared on objects like the Tassilo Chalice (777-788) and the Lindau Gospels, circulated through Scandinavian wood-carving, and by the twelfth century erupted again in Romanesque sculpture across Europe. A lion at Rock, Worcestershire, carved around 1150, reproduces a motif from the Tassilo Chalice: a lion whose tail pierces its own hind legs. Fifteen hundred years separated the original Germanic impulse from its Romanesque reinvention, yet the image persisted, as if the medieval mind kept returning to this one perfect expression of bodily violation and self-entanglement.
For all the official handwringing about demons and deception, medieval people couldn't stop drawing these creatures. Couldn't stop writing about them. Couldn't stop carving them into the very churches where they were supposed to be praying for deliverance from such monstrosities. It was the medieval equivalent of I'm not touching you, I'm not touching you played between theology and imagination, and theology was losing.
For it was in these figures the medieval imagination confessed what it could never silence: transformation is inevitable, and the margins are alive.
The Etymology Bit
Monstrum derives from the Latin monstrare ('to show, reveal, demonstrate') and monere ('to warn'). Monsters are signs, portents, divine communications. They demonstrate something, usually about the boundaries of natural order or impending divine judgment.
When a baboon plays bagpipes in a manuscript margin, it's monstrating something about music, rationality, and the limits of human exceptionalism.
The Liberation of Monsters
When manuscript production shifted from monastic scriptoriums to commercial urban workshops in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, something happened... The tight integration between textual meaning and visual programme began to dissolve. Monsters migrated from Romanesque historiated initials to Gothic manuscript margins.
The shift from monastic to commercial production transformed the relationship between text and image. As Winternitz (1975) observes, while ecclesiastical authorities controlled the choice of sacred themes, artists gained freedom through the very nature of their medium. Where Scripture used words, painters and sculptors were 'permitted and, of course, expected to add details to create a lifelike, sensuously convincing appearance.' This meant turning to 'mundane objects, for instance, musical instruments.' The Twenty-Four Elders in Beatus manuscripts hold uniform vielles, but when sculptors depicted them in Romanesque church portals like Moissac, 'the natural artistic tendency toward variety gained the upper hand.' By the time of Santiago de Compostela's Portico de la Gloria, the elders play harps, psalteries, organistrum, and various vielles: 'a full irruption of secular musical tradition into the realm of sacred art.'
These marginalised spaces became what we might call cultural laboratories, areas where medieval society could experiment with transgressive possibilities without directly challenging central authorities. The apparent frivolity of marginal monsters masked serious cultural work of boundary exploration and category testing.
Sound familiar?
Fast forward to 1841 and the founding of Punch, which often dipped its pen into the fantastical: absurd creatures, mythological setups, surreal exaggerations, all in service of mocking authority.
The pattern holds: create a 'safe' fantastical space (manuscript margins, satirical journals, secondary fantasy worlds), populate it with apparent nonsense (musical baboons, bureaucratic dragons, sentient luggage), and use that cover to explore what the dominant culture finds threatening.
Pietrini demonstrates those marginal musical misfits weren't gist thrown together for giggles and shits, but were full on satirical hit-squads deployed a coherent satirical strategy: improper instruments didn't merely denote ignorance but performed a specific critique. The jesters who played such instruments (dreaded by Christian writers as ministri Satanae)were visually linked to apes and other degraded creatures. A baboon on bagpipes wasn't just funny; it was a theological statement about the rational soul and the limits of what counted as proper music.
Jeffrey Jerome Cohen's monster theory explains these creatures who loiter at the edges of medieval manuscripts as 'category-crisis' indicators: the aforementioned dragons etc embodied the contradictions and desires that surface at the boundaries of cultural knowledge and the structures of medieval society.
Barreiro and Cordo Russo (2019) crank the volume: shapeshifters aren't mere monsters, they’re rule-breakers in motion. A man turning into a wolf? Cool, on paper. File that under 'W' for werewolf, and toddle along. What blows the lid off is when he flips between human and beast without warning. The shock isn't in being two things at once, it's in the ride, the unpredictable transformation.
Mary Douglas reminds us monsters flourish in the perilous nooks and crannies of thought: those polluted spaces between established categories. Victor Turner calls this perpetually liminal. In that zone, change isn't a maybe. It's coming for you, whether you like it or not.
Medieval music theory maintained strict hierarchies: stringed instruments occupied the upper registers of creation, percussion the lower, yet monsters systematically violated these orderings. Pietrini notes that while devils predictably played wind and percussion, devilish creatures occasionally wielded harps, creating what she calls 'superposition of elements' that produced shock value precisely through categorical transgression.
Medieval dance occupied remarkably similar conceptual terrain. As Kathryn Dickason demonstrates in her meticulous foray into biblical dance typologies, bodily movement existed in the same polluted interstices as monsters: simultaneously sacred and profane, ordered and chaotic.
Medieval artists resolved the theological problem through satire: if shapeshifters and musical monsters couldn't be theologically reconciled, they could be aesthetically demolished. Pietrini argues that the parody of instruments functioned as a safety valve. The very impossibility of a monster playing a jawbone reassured viewers that such creatures belonged to an inverted, cacophonous underworld, not the rational order of creation.
The appearance of secular instruments in sacred contexts wasn't accidental. Winternitz notes that as polyphonic music developed in France and Italy, painters 'unfamiliar with the instruments played in heaven and lacking instructions from his clerical advisers' simply 'lifted them from earth into paradise.' Yet while individual instruments were portrayed with precision, 'the grouping of the musicians and their combination into ensembles is often far from being true to real practice.' The sacred and secular weren't neatly compartmentalised; they bled into each other.
Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodl. 264, f. 21v.
The figura (the figure, if we must) functioned identically in both dance and shapeshifting: anchored in historical reality whilst foreshadowing events to come. As monsters embodied 'category-crisis,' biblical dancers like Miriam and David performed acceptable transformation through movement, while the dancers around the golden calf enacted the very idolatria monsters represented. Dance, like shapeshifting, was transformation made visible, a diachronic rather than synchronic phenomenon.
Michel Foucault adds another layer: monstrous otherness wasn't feared, it was managed. Manuscript margins, church corbels, and epic poems became containment zones for the unruly, a sort of spiritual monster playpen, where anxieties could be explored safely without the risk of immediate apocalypse.
MS 1-2005 15 r
Here's where things get theologically sticky. Augustine condemned metamorphosis as ludificatio daemonum (devil's tricks), creating a fundamental problem: if shapeshifting was purely demonic illusion, how could it serve legitimate narrative and moral functions? If it was real, how could it be reconciled with Christian teachings about the integrity of divine creation and bodily resurrection?
Thomas Bradwardine provided a crucial distinction: acceptable metamorphosis (temporary transformation preserving human substance) versus heretical metempsychosis (soul transmigration between bodies). While humans could transform bodily into beasts through magic or alchemy, this differed fundamentally from Pythagorean reincarnation which would allow eternal life outside Christ.
Medieval culture resolved this tension through theological compartmentalisation: accepting shapeshifting as legitimate literary and artistic device while maintaining its theological illegitimacy. This allowed continued use of transformation narratives while preserving orthodox doctrine, but it also created underlying tensions that give medieval shapeshifting literature much of its psychological complexity.
A Taxonomy of Musical Monsters
Medieval monster-musicians resist simple categorisation, which is the point. Let's meet a few:
Dramatis Monstrorum
Mythological Beings
Dragons might signify Satanic evil, Christ himself, or a set of natural-philosophical principles, depending entirely on context. This agreeable flexibility made them potent symbolic instruments, and correspondingly hazardous ones, best handled with care.
Hybrid Creatures
Centaurs combined human rationality with animal passion, becoming symbols of humanity's perpetual tension between spiritual aspiration and physical limitation. Musical centaurs specifically explored the relationship between rational soul and animal nature. When a centaur plays a bagpipe, who is really making the music, the human half or the horse half? The correct answer, of course, is yes.
The Kaufmann Haggadah (1350-1360, Catalonia) materialises this exact crisis. On folio 34v, a hybrid piper appears with 'an animal's lower part and a man's upper body or head' (Falvy 1996: 239). The instrument, Falvy notes, 'has got no function here', it appears purely as boundary violation. Folio 55 presents a hybrid piper at the bottom of a framework illustration where 'the wind instrument, which is hard to define, seems to be too large against the proportions of the animal's body and human head' (Falvy 1996: 239). The disproportion itself becomes the point: these creatures actively distort the expected relationships between body, tool, and music-making capacity.
Paris, Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève, 143, f. 001
Hybrid creatures occupied the exact liminal space where Scythian and Celtic traditions collided with Christian iconography. Medieval artists faced the same problem their barbarian predecessors had: how to represent the violent collision of incompatible forces within a single form. The Scythians, Mederos notes, 'had a great desire to express violent action and emotion,' favoring subjects of 'animals dying or devouring each other.' This visual language of bodies in struggle, of forms that couldn't be reconciled, persisted into the medieval period. A centaur, as the perfect hybrid, inherited this aesthetic burden. A living repository of ornamental traditions stretching back to nomadic warriors trading in Southern Russian steppes.
Sirens
Sirens are among the few creatures whose entire ontological purpose is music-making, not incidental instrument-playing like a centaur with a bagpipe, but voice as weapon, song as fatal enchantment. In Homer's Odyssey (translated by William Cullen Bryant), they sit in a green field charming passersby with 'mellow notes' and 'warbled melodies,' their voices alone sufficient to lure men to death among heaps of bones and shrivelled skin.
Grotesques & Babewyns
Derived from babuini (baboons), these simian-like creatures embodied specific anxieties about the relationship between human and animal nature. Their musical activities could function as either parody (mocking human cultural pretensions) or genuine participation (suggesting universal distribution of divine sparks throughout creation).
Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodl. 264, f. 20v.
These creatures carried within them the entire genealogy of barbarian ornament. The interlaced bodies, the compressed and distorted anatomies, the refusal to leave empty space. These were visual strategies inherited from Celtic knot-work and Scythian animal plaques. Mederos notes that 'despite the three dimensionality of the figures' in Romanesque sculpture, 'their physical make up was still distorted for purposes of design, and the patterning on their forms was still a very linear rendering of fur, feathers, or scales.'
A centaur playing a vielle still maintains the subject-object relationship, but when the instrument becomes the body, or when instruments gain autonomous mobility, you've completely collapsed the category distinction.
It's the ultimate 'category-crisis': not just human/animal boundary dissolution, but the erasure of animate/inanimate, user/tool, player/played. A bagpipe with legs mocks the entire hierarchical structure of creation itself.
The collapse of animate/inanimate distinction reached a logical extreme in what Zarnecki calls 'penetration': animals whose bodies are pierced by their own tails, limbs, or ornamental bands that simultaneously are and aren't part of them.
On the Lindau Gospels back cover, snake-like creatures are penetrated by 'sinuous, almost leafless stalks, which enter the bodies and reemerge.' Is the stalk part of the creature or external to it? The distinction dissolves. This motif, Zarnecki argues, likely 'originated in needlework, where the thread can be used in this way more logically than in metalwork'. The body becomes a surface for abstract pattern to pierce and traverse. When a Romanesque illuminator depicted a human figure from Modena 'pierced by scrolls of foliage a number of times,' creating 'a disturbing, even repulsive image,' the medieval artists were inheriting it from a thousand years of Germanic visual tradition. The human or animal body becomes not a unified form but a field that ornament passes through.
The theological implications were genuinely thorny. Medieval music theory, derived from Boethian and Platonic sources, understood music as a fundamental structuring principle of reality itself: the harmony of the spheres, the mathematical ratios governing both musical intervals and planetary motions. So when monsters make music, they engage in cosmic participation rather than simple cultural mimicry. This raised questions about rational soul and its relationship to musical comprehension. If music-making required rational soul (the capacity for mathematical reasoning which distinguished humans from animals), what did it mean when a baboon played bagpipes?
Medieval theologians officially condemned shapeshifting and monstrosity, yet medieval artists kept reproducing the pierced bodies, the interlaced limbs, the creatures strangled by their own ornament. Zarnecki notes that the Herefordshire School sculptor responsible for the font at Chaddesley Corbett (with its fierce monsters 'baring their teeth with one leg up and the other down') was almost certainly drawing on 'very ancient models' stretching back to Germanic pagan art. The sculptor may have known nothing of the theological debates about metempsychosis and ludificatio daemonum, they were simply perpetuating a visual language so deep in the tradition that it survived Christianisation itself.
Medieval theologians, faced with the thorny problem of musically-inclined monsters, developed several strategies to explain away the inconvenient: the mechanical explanation suggested it was pure training, no actual insight involved, like teaching a parrot to swear; the limited rationality approach proposed that these creatures possessed a restricted rational capacity sufficient for musical participation but not much else; universal harmony argued that divine principles extended rather further than orthodox theology cared to acknowledge, which made certain bishops nervous; and the angelic resolution, particularly beloved by Irish hagiography, simply declared that those weren't monsters at all, they were angels in disguise.
Medieval monster-musicians operated on two registers simultaneously, which medieval audiences likely understood as deeply connected. On one level, as Cohen and Douglas suggest, these creatures expressed authentic anxieties about boundary dissolution, the medieval mind genuinely feared and fascinated itself with beings who refused categorical stability. But Pietrini's research reveals a more targeted deployment: these same visual languages of monstrosity were systematically weaponised against professional entertainers. Yet this distinction shouldn't obscure the deeper logic: by making entertainers visually monstrous, medieval artists could transform a social and theological problem (how to condemn performers the culture simultaneously enjoyed) into an aesthetic one. Mockery became containment. The monsters were both genuine expressions of categorical anxiety and sophisticated instruments of social control.
This ingenious contraption exploded across Europe in the mid-thirteenth century. One moment it barely existed; the next, manuscripts from England to Spain were depicting the same curious instrument combination.
Every region claimed it with a different name: the galoubet in sun-drenched Provence, the Schwegel in German-speaking lands, the txistu in the Basque hills. But the appeal was universal. Need music for a Burgundian tournament? Pipe and tabor. Street festival in a Spanish town square? Pipe and tabor. Shakespeare's Globe Theatre needed atmospheric sound effects? You guessed it.
The frestel, medieval Europe’s answer to the panpipe, held the iconographic high ground for a good three centuries before vanishing around 1300.
Fashioned from boxwood, with neatly convex ends and a monoxyle construction, this single-handed marvel found itself equally at home on cathedral portals and skulking in the margins of manuscripts.
The frestel quietly lost its place. What remains is a single archaeological specimen and a handful of stone and painted representations, collectively staring back at us with an air of profound and mocking mystery.
