The Medieval Wild Man

This book traces the trajectory of the appearance of and developing attitudes toward the mythic social group known to Western medieval Europe as the "Wild People" through literary texts and visual images from the twelfth through sixteenth centuries. Stock argues against the prevailing model of the development of the medieval construction of the Wild People, offering a new and different paradigm that demonstrates Europe's continuous ambivalence about the binary of "nature" versus "culture," as expressed in their ongoing love/hate relationship with the Wild Man.