My Eyes Beheld an Eerie Sight

As part of my internship with Pitts Theology Library, I curated a digital exhibition about monsters as they show up in theological texts. I was most drawn to the idea of an exhibition about monsters due to my work with fantasy literature as religion, a space where questions about monsters plays a role in the morality that fantasy can possibly teach us. As such, I incorporated mainly early print texts and a few manuscripts that offered perspectives on the ways that monsters function within society. This includes landmark texts, like Martin Luther and Philip Melanchthon's imagery of two beasts that predict the fall of Roman Catholicism, but also more localized texts such as hand-written records from the Spanish Inquisition trials at Barcelona. I consistently attempted to bring these texts and the ideas they present back to questions about monsters today by using quotes from major fantasy authors/scholars (like J. R. R. Tolkien and Ebony Elizabeth Thomas) to viewers to continue asking questions about monstrous imagery in their own lives.