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

在2022财年，我把研究重点放在了混合怪物上。混血生物和怪物之间存在着复杂的关系：并非所有的怪物都是混血生物，混血生物也不一定是怪物，但混血和怪物之间仍然存在着很强的联系。我试图在畸形学的历史中澄清这种关系，即“怪物科学”，从它起源于亚里士多德生物学直到世纪早期。 最初，在亚里士多德那里，杂交和畸形是完全分开的：即使一个畸形的存在看起来像是几个物种的结合，这也只不过是我们所做的一个肤浅的类比，在杂交的生物现象中没有任何基础。这种理性主义和还原论的混合怪物的观点在整个基督教中世纪都受到了挑战，但中世纪文化中大量的混合怪物：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，以至于它们变得非常矛盾，既熟悉又非凡，体现了，可以说，“陌生人的熟悉形象”。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世纪初的首次发展中，混血怪物的存在仍然具有一定的可信度，因此中世纪关于它们的许多表述和概念都融入了畸形学科学的早期阶段。

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.