Christ, What a Monster!

I was looking for one particular monster in a copy of the Liber monstrorum—the “Book of Monsters”—from the monastery of St. Gall, Switzerland. As part of my preparation for a project on Early Medieval trans lives, I was interested in the “human of both sexes” which opens this catalogue of monstrous, marvelous, and incredible beings. Before I got to it, however, I was struck by a doodle of a human figure (fig. 1) on the first, originally blank page of the 9^th-century manuscript, whose digital facsimile I was leafing through. The pose of crucifixion and the crossed nimbus¹ unmistakably identified the figure as Christ—yet, just as unmistakably, it had been drawn with breasts.

Figure 1: St. Gallen, Stiftsbibliothek, Cod. Sang. 237, p. 1 (detail), CC BY-NC 4.0 via e-codicies—Virtual Manuscript Library of Switzerland

While early medieval depictions of the crucified Christ are quite diverse—the spectrum goes from barrel-chested and muscular (fig. 2) to gaunt and emaciated (fig. 3)—I had never come across a Christ-figure quite like this.

It felt immediately obvious to me that the St. Gall Christ was “of both sexes” in his own way. As I discussed the image with colleagues, however, a split emerged: every queer historian at least agreed that something gendered was going on here—the most common interpretation being a trans masculine body—but most cishet people could not see it.² Finally, though, I found the doodle described as a “female figure” (Frauengestalt) in Albert Bruckner’s catalogue of St. Gall manuscripts from 1938.³ While the situation for queer people in 1930s Switzerland was a lot less dire than in Nazi Germany, we would still not expect a methodologically conservative medievalist and palaeographer like Bruckner to be particularly open to seeing Christ as ambiguously gendered.⁴ Only with his description, then, did I feel I had a sufficiently strong counter to that all-too-common accusation leveled against historians of premodern queerness and transness: that we only see what we want to see, injecting our degenerate modern ways into a pristine past.

In parallel to my informal survey on Jesus’s breasts, I returned, finally, to the description of the “human of both sexes” I had initially come to the St. Gall manuscript for. The first chapter of the Liber monstrorum, as it appears in the critical edition of this text, translates to something like the following:

I profess at the beginning of this work that I have known a certain human of both sexes, who, while they appeared in their own face and breast more male than female and they were believed to be a man by those who did not know, still loved female works and often deceived ignorant men in the manner of a whore. But it is said that this has occurred often in the human race.⁵

The original author, who probably worked in the British Isles in the 7^th or 8^th century, seems to be saying that not being sortable into any particular gender category could on its own constitute monstrosity, could draw into question one’s full humanity (even while admitting that this was a quite common phenomenon both in his immediate surroundings in the early medieval British Isles and humanity in general). The monstrous being exemplifying this point necessarily had to elide gender categories as well: the description could be interpreted to refer to people who might now variously identify as non-binary, intersex, trans, and/or bottoms (whose sexual predilections meant that they were “not a real man”). It is likely that, in the eyes of the author, any of these would have been enough to warrant inclusion in a list of monsters.

Following this queer monster, his work contained descriptions of beings like sirens, giants, centaurs, and dragons—but also Black people, betraying a combination of prejudices that feel almost modern.⁶ Similarly and shockingly modern are the author’s views on what was about to (or ought to?) happen to the monsters in his book, which he set out in the prologue: the monstrous beings he was about to describe “have already been utterly rooted out … throughout many corners of the earth; and now, torn from the shores, are hurled headlong into the waves.”⁷

The 9^th-century copyist from St. Gall pushed back against this through two small but significant interventions. They did not copy out the prologue that contained the violent fantasy of eradication, and they let the “human of both sexes” speak in the first person instead of describing them in the third: “I appeared in my own face and breast more male than female, and I was believed to be a man by those who did not know,” and so forth.⁸ I was not the first to notice this change: printed editions dutifully record this variant reading in the critical apparatus. But since the editors were only interested in reconstructing their best approximation of the “original” Liber monstrorum, they could easily ignore the scribal interventions as mere corruptions of the Urtext. Taking the scribe at their word, however, it seems that at least one monk in 9^th-century St. Gall actively identified with the “human of both sexes” and did not agree with the author of the Liber monstrorum that this should mean that they had to be cast out of human society.

It is unclear when the doodle of—as I would see it—transmasc Jesus was added to this manuscript, though at least the pen trials that surround it are probably not much younger than the main text—maybe from the late 9^th or 10^th century. At any rate, the doodle was clearly not part of the “pre-planned” pictorial program of the manuscript, and thus presumably added by a later user. The monk who drew it seems to have radicalized the point made by the copyist. This may have stemmed from the artist’s familiarity with any number of other early medieval texts that disagreed with the author of the Liber monstrorum on the consequences of transgressing binary sex. In addition to the text in front of them, they may have been inspired by the stories of trans masculine monk-saints—a surprisingly common hagiographic motif since the 5^th century⁹—or by an exegetical tradition that believed binary sex to be the product of original sin, and thus something that Christ had already overcome in the resurrection.¹⁰ The artist could have arrived at their conclusion through many different routes, but clearly the conclusion they arrived at was this: not only was to be “of both sexes” to be a fully human, rational interlocutor who could speak in the first person; to be “of both sexes” was also to be Christ-like.

In the interplay of the monster and the Christ “of both sexes,” separated only by the thickness of one parchment folio, and the conversation between multiple monks it implies—possibly over generations—we may even be getting faint glimpses of some kind of queer code.¹¹ Telling a fellow-monk that he should “go and read the Book of Monsters” may have suggested, to those in the know, that one was interested in bottoming, or that one’s own body would, if it were visible under the monk’s habit, be read as looking “more female.” Maybe it could mean both, depending on context and current company. While we will never be able to know the exact meaning this manuscript carried, I am heartened by the thought that queer monks may have used it to find community in their monstrous, Christ-like existence.¹²

1. I.e. a halo, broken up by a vertical and a horizontal band that cross behind the head of the figure. In medieval art, the crossed nimbus was largely reserved for the three persons of the trinity. For more examples, see https://theindex.princeton.edu/s/view/ViewSubject.action?id=0D2800FA-F8E3-4B7C-B8AC-2225A4D42145. Accessed December 10, 2025.
2. A (straight) medical doctor I am friends with at least diagnosed this Jesus with gynecomastia, in a way splitting the difference.
3. Albert Bruckner, Schreibschulen der Diözese Konstanz: St. Gallen 2. Scriptoria medii aevi Helvetica 3 (Roto-Sadag, 1938), 85.
4. For example, after the closure of the Institut für Sexualwissenschaften and destruction of its archive by the Nazis, Magnus Hirschfeld went into exile in Zurich. His last book, Die Weltreise eines Sexualforschers, was published in Switzerland in 1933.
5. Liber monstrorum (secolo IX): Introduzione, edizione critica, traduzione, note e commento. Nuovo Medioevo 88, ed. Franco Porsia, (Liguori, 2^nd ed. 2012), 126: Me enim quendam hominem in primordio operis utriusque sexus cognovisse testor, qui tamen ipsa facie plus et pectore virilis quam muliebris apparuit et vir a nescientibus putabatur; sed muliebria opera dilexit et ignaros virorum more meretricis decipiebat. Sed hoc frequenter apud humanum genus contigisse fertur.
6. Interestingly, Black people are the only “monsters” beside the queer one that the author claims to have met themselves: Liber monstrorum, ed. Porsia, 192: quorum nos quendam vidimus (we ourselves saw one of them).
7. Liber monstrorum, ed. Porsia, 124: per plurimos terrae angulos eradicata … et nunc revulsa litoribus, prona torquentur ad undas.
8. St Gallen, Stiftsbibliothek, Cod. Sang. 237, p. 2: [I]psa facie plus et pectore virilis quam muliebris apparui et vir a nescientibus putabar…
9. Cf. M. W. Bychowski, “The Authentic Lives of Transgender Saints. Imago Dei and imitatio Christi in the Life of St Marinos the Monk,” in Trans and Genderqueer Subjects in Medieval Hagiography. Hagiography Beyond Tradition, ed. Blake Gutt and Alicia Spencer-Hall (Amsterdam University Press, 2021), 245–66.
10. Cf. Leah DeVun, The Shape of Sex: Nonbinary Gender from Genesis to the Renaissance (Columbia University Press, 2021).
11. The manuscript is still available in the monastery library, so these conversations may never have ceased.
12. A more academic version of the argument I’m making here has been published as Michael Eber, “I, monster: Queerness and the Liber monstrorum in Early Medieval St Gall,” Early Medieval Europe 34, no. 4 (2024): 543–564.