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

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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.