Monsters fell usually into the category of special providences, that is to say, they were believed to be intended as a general warning from God, rather than being specific to the afflicted persons, although clearly God might have singled out some especially egregious sinners for visitation. The advent of humanism made available the natural histories of the ancients and the development of postal networks and printed books transmitted infiomation rapidly across Europe. The publication of details of individual prodigies, usually illustrated with a woodcut and with some topical interpretation, and the assembly of collections of prodigies thus became commonplace. One of the most famous collections of prodigies was that of Pierre Boaistuau (d. 1566), Histoires prodigieuses, extraictes de plusieurs fameux autheurs, grecs & latins, sacrez & prophanes mises en nostre langue (Paris, 1567), from which the picture above is taken. Very widely documented in many contemporary publications, the monster of Ravenna was one of the earliest monstrous births to attain international notoriety. A child was born with severe birth defects in the Italian city of Ravenna. Shortly thereafter, Italian forces were defeated in the Battle of Ravenna. The monstrous birth then became a symbol of the Italians' defeat, brought about by their moral turpitude.
As well as making collections of instances, humanist authors pored through the works on prodigies of classical authors such as Pliny, whose Natural History depicted Africa as a source of the exotic.
Pliny's discussion focussed not on individual monstrosities but on the monstrous races believed to inhabit the more remote parts of Africa and Asia. His compilations of current knowledge influenced Renaissance travellers' tales and attitudes towards the indigenous peoples of lands visited and colonized.
Classical texts were also translated into the vernacular, and illustrated for popular consumption.
Konrad Lycosthenes (1518-1561) also collected a wide range of unusual phenomena, partly in order to show the hand of God at work.
Called "the German Strabo," Sebastian Münster was a geographer, cartographer, Hebraist, and theologian. His work focused on topography and history in a humanist tradition. First issued in 1544, the Cosmographia was reprinted and expanded in 1550 with many new maps and town-plans, in keeping with the growing appetite among readers for new topographic and geographic records. Mapmakers were not above decorating their maps with fantastic images of the animals and exotic humans to be found in farflung corners of the Earth, especially the New World. In this, they relied on travellers' tales and classical texts rather than their own imaginations. Diogo Homan's 1558 map of Brazil and Patagonia is an especially vivid example of this tendency. detail of cannibals
From monstrosity as Providence to monstrosity as a freak
of Nature
An influential and widely circulated work was that of the eminent (Huguenot?) surgeon, Ambroise Paré, Des Monstres et prodiges (Paris, 1573). He illustrated a wide range of monstrosities, including the conjoined twins and the child born with the face of a frog, shown above. [This book is available in a modern English-language edition.]
The cabinets of curiosities created by many early modern naturalists were often designed to exhibit just such exemplary phenomena, whether created by nature or by human artifice. This was the case with the collections of Athanasius Kircher SJ, at the Collegio Romano, and those of Ole Worm, shown here in the posthumous catalogue.
Ole Worm (1588-1654), professor of medicine at Copenhagen, had a huge collection, part of which is seen here: rare and exotic animals, plants, and minerals, including a crocodile and an armadillo mounted on the right-hand wall. His collection was purchased after his death by Duke Friedrich III of Schleswig-Holstein. There was a general interest in wondrous phenomena as part of nature, which very gradually overwhelmed the providential view of monstrosities.
Throughout early modern natural history and natural philosophy, knowledge was desired of those objects and creatures that formed the boundaries between different categories, or which appeared to transgress the established categories into which natural phenomena had been classified. Thus the study of the boundary between the natural and the preternatural involved the explorer and the demonologist, as much as the naturalist and the anatomist.
O. Niccoli, Prophecy and People in Renaissance Italy, tr. L.G. Cochrane (Princeton, 1990)
J. Céard, La nature et les prodiges (Geneva, 1977)
Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park, Wonders and the
Order of Nature, 1150-1750 (New York, 1998)
[many other essays by these two authors address this issue]
Paula Findlen, "Jokes of Nature and Jokes of Knowledge: The Playfulness of Scientific Discourse in Early Modern Europe," Renaissance Quarterly 43 (1990): 292-331
Steven Mullaney, "Strange Things, Gross Terms, Curious Customs: The Rehearsal of Cultures in the Late Renaissance", Representations, No. 3. (Summer, 1983), 40-67
Marie-Helene Huet, "Living Images: Monstrosity and Representation", Representations, No. 4. (Autumn, 1983), 73-87
Helaine Razovsky, "Popular Hermeneutics: Monstrous Children in English Renaissance Broadside Ballads", Early Modern Literary Studies 2.3 (1996): 1.1-34
Madeleine Doran, "On Elizabethan 'Credulity': With Some Questions Concerning the Use of the Marvelous in Literature", Journal of the History of Ideas 1 (1940) 151-176
Anne Jacobson Schutte, " 'Such Monstrous Births': A Neglected Aspect of the Antinomian Controversy", Renaissance Quarterly 38 (1985) 85-106