For four years, “Quid Plura?” has chased medievalist echoes in New Orleans—the statue of Ignatius Reilly, a shrine to a French saint, the glitter of Joan of Arc—as well as medieval-ish statuary in Cajun country and miscellaneous medievalism on the North Shore.

Yes, here there be saints—but where are the medieval monsters?

Earlier this week, on a hot afternoon, we sought to answer that question by turning to someone who slays them.

What say you, heroically-abdomened St. George in a hotel courtyard just outside the French Quarter?

George points west, so we’re off to the 16th Ward, where the beasts atop Tilton Memorial Hall at Tulane are timelessly monstrous rather than strictly medieval…

…but the alley behind the building hides a clutch of caudophagic dragons.



Heeding the call of the neo-Gothic, we take the streetcar east into Ward 12 and trudge down to the impressive St. Stephen Church on Napoleon Avenue…

…and when we look up…


…the neo-medieval mocks us.

Yet we cling to the hope of grotesquerie, just as two miles to the east, on Jackson Avenue in Ward 10, something clings to the side of a gutted 19th-century synagogue…

…a creature not quite medieval…

…but poised to petrify your inner ten-year-old.