Anna Zayaruznaya, The Monstrous New Art: Divided Forms in the Late Medieval Motet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. xviii + 301 pp. ISBN 978-1-107-03966-7.

In four quatrefoiled roundels, a centaur aims its bow, a mermaid (or -man) bends over to touch its own tail, an eight-limbed womanspider looks aghast with palms turned out, and a bird-siren clutches one hand to her cheek in a gesture of despair. With such images, taken from a copy of the Ovide moralisé dated to c. 1325, is the cover of Anna Zayaruznaya’s fascinating and compelling exploration of the monstrous in the fourteenth-century motet illustrated: author and publishermust have been spoilt for choice in terms of cover illustrations, given the ubiquity of hybrid and monstrous bodies on the pages and in the margins of medieval illuminated manuscripts. Such images attest to the latemedieval fascination withmonstrosity, particularly in the form of divided or grafted bodies: beyond the relatively conventional sirens and centaurs such as those pictured here, artists experimented with splicing human heads or torsos onto a variety of legs or tails, and in some cases disrupted bodily order still further by transposing the body parts, arse above face. In narrative works, particularly bestiaries, the meanings of bodies, real and imagined, were explored, and the theme of transformation of bodies was likewise well rehearsed in medieval texts, many drawing inspiration fromOvid, whoseMetamorphoses circulated widely in both Latin and vernacular versions. The opening lines of theMetamorphoses, ‘In nova fert animus mutatas dicere formas / corpora’ (‘Of bodies chang’d to various forms I sing’, in the English verse translation of 1717), were quoted – appropriately