Theories and representations of "hybridity" in Western history of thought

在FY2022，我把我的研究重点放在混合怪物上。混血儿和怪物之间有着复杂的关系：不是所有的怪物都是混血儿，混血儿也不一定是怪物，但混血儿和怪物之间仍然有着很强的联系。我试图在畸形学（即“怪物科学”）的历史中阐明这种关系，从它起源于亚里士多德的生物学直到17世纪早期。最初，在亚里士多德，杂交性和怪物性是完全分开的：即使一个怪物看起来像几个物种的组合，这只不过是我们做的一个肤浅的类比，没有杂交的生物现象的任何基础。这种关于混合怪物的理性主义和简化主义观点在整个基督教中世纪都受到了挑战，但中世纪文化中混合怪物的大量存在：从艺术到文学和神学，混合怪物在中世纪的表现中无处不在，很矛盾的是，它们变得既熟悉又不同寻常，体现了，可以这么说，“陌生的熟悉形象”。这些混血怪物注定要从科学畸形学中消失，但我可以证明，在16世纪末和17世纪初的早期发展中，混血怪物的存在仍然具有一定的可信度，因此许多关于它们的中世纪表征和概念都被整合到畸形学的早期阶段。

In FY2022, I focused my research on hybrid monsters. There is a complex relationship between hybrid beings and monsters: not all monsters are hybrids, and hybrid beings are not necessarily monsters, but there is still a strong connection between hybridity and monstrosity. I tried to clarify this relationship in the history of teratology, namely the “science of monsters”, from its origins in Aristotelian biology until the early seventeenth century. Originally, in Aristotle, hybridity and monstrosity are completely separated: even if a monstrous being looks like a combination of several species, this is nothing more than a superficial analogy that we make, without any ground in the biological phenomenon of hybridity. This rationalistic and reductionist view of hybrid monsters was challenged throughout the Christian Middle Ages but the profusion of hybrid monsters in medieval culture: from art to literature and theology, hybrid monsters were so ubiquitous in medieval representations that they became, quite paradoxically, as much familiar as they were extraordinary, embodying, so to speak, “a familiar image of the strange”. These hybrid monsters were doomed to disappear from scientific teratology, but I could show that, in its first developments in the late sixteenth century and early seventeenth century, some credibility was still lent to the existence of hybrid monsters, so that much of the medieval representations and conceptions about them were integrated in the early stages of teratological science.