Birth

“England’s New Wonders”: Monstrous Births in the Early Modern Period

A historiographical motif by Dana Perfetto

Personalized reading lists on particular themes – # 3

"Les Oeuvres d'Ambroise Pare ..."

The motif of birth (and rebirth) was enacted both literally and figuratively in early modern England. A site of political, economic and cultural Renaissance, all of the nation’s major institutions experienced upheaval. The period was one in which insular concerns of the individual and state converged with those of the outside world. At the same time that state-sponsored voyages of exploration opened up new trade routes, exposing the English to inhabitants of the wider world along with new and exotic species of animals and plant life, debates were raging about that most intimate of subjects: the defining characteristic by which humans were distinguished from animals. The authority of the Church on such matters was being undermined in by, among other things, empirical science as espoused by Francis Bacon. The new science privileged observation over mere hypothesis, proof over blind faith. Most unsettling to the early modern psyche, it revealed that, in terms of physical structure and anatomy, humans and animals were actually quite similar.

Further destabilizing the supposed human predominance over the natural world were phenomena termed “monstrous births.” Broadsheets, pamphlets and other forms of popular literature included accounts of these births, most often the progeny of women of the lower classes, which usually took the form of severely deformed children (lacking limbs or endowed with superfluous ones), parasitic or conjoined twins, or humans with animal features. These hybrids caused much anxiety and consternation, straddling as they did the imagined but profoundly significant division between humans and animals. The existence of such creatures was exploited by many different groups who used them to further religious or political agendas. Dominant among these were moralists who deemed monstrous births to be signs of God’s displeasure, usually targeting the child’s mother as a warning to society at large. Others took a more moderate stance, claiming that “monsters” were “part of the plenitude of creation” (Bates, 2005) and therefore not outside of the natural order as had been suspected. Current scholarship on the topic tends to historicize the phenomenon of monstrous births, offering comparative studies of these types of occurrences in Europe during the period or, alternatively, placing them within the broad socio-cultural context of English society. No matter the context in which they are considered, monstrous births provide a fascinating point of convergence for a variety of different interests and ideologies in the early modern period, revealing overall the acute anxiety which the Renaissance engendered.

Primary Sources

England’s new wonders or Four strange and amazing Relations that have lately come to pass in England, 1697, Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine Library.

News from John Street, being a strange and true relation of a Monstrous Creature which was brought forth by a sow, 1676, Bodleian Library.

The Strange monster or, True news from Nottingham-shire, 1668, Folger Shakespeare Library.

These sources provide a representative sampling of written accounts of monstrous births from the early modern period, usually in the form of pamphlets and broadsheets. They often reveal an agenda on the part of the authors, whether as critiques of political issues and figures, invectives against immoral behaviour or religious statements meant to edify readers.

Paré, Ambroise. On monsters and marvels. Trans. Janis L. Pallister. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983. Published in 1573, Paré’s is the first such work to address the classification of monsters. In it the author groups together examples of monsters by causes rather than their meaning.

Secondary Sources

Park, Katherine and Lorraine J. Daston. “Unnatural conceptions: the study of monsters in sixteenth and seventeenth-century France and England.” Past & Present 92 (August 1981) : 20-54. Charts the evolution of thought about monsters from classical Greece to the medieval period and considers the impact of such thought on the early modern period. The authors then examine attitudes towards monstrous births in the Renaissance including Francis Bacon’s attempts to use them as a specific point of scientific enquiry. They also engage in a cultural comparison of the positioning of the monster in France and England.

Fudge, Erica. Perceiving Animals: Humans and Beasts in Early Modern English Culture. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000. An historical investigation of the development of early modern religious and scientific thought related to definitions of humanness. Fudge reveals a society preoccupied with legitimizing and maintaining its dominance over the natural world. She also investigates the manner in which creatures like the Wildman and the wereman complicated this dominance by casting doubt on the absolute inseparability of human and animal.

Fudge, Erica; Gilbert, Ruth; Wiseman, Susan, eds. At the Borders of the Human: Beasts, Bodies and Natural Philosophy in the Early Modern Period. London: Macmillan, 2002. A collection of scholarly essays which examine the liminality of religious, political, cultural and social structures in England during the early modern period. As society sought to negotiate physical and psychological boundaries between self and other owing to England’s new imperialist ventures, it was also confronted with rapid changes at the national level. The works examine these forces together with a focus on the implications for ideology which sought to define the human and humanness during the period.

Bates, Alan W. “Good, common, regular, and orderly: early modern classifications of monstrous births.” Social History of Medicine 18.2 (2005) : 141-158. A discussion of early modern debates about the purpose of monstrous births in which they were broadly viewed as portents — signs of God’s displeasure, as wonders — signs of divine providence, or as “part of the plenitude of creation” which was meant to be viewed empirically. In terms of cultural history, this is a broader, but complimentary, treatment of the monster than is to be found in the cited article by Katherine Park and Lorraine J. Daston in that it examines the phenomena in Italy, Switzerland and Germany in addition to France.

Shevelow, Kathryn. For the Love of Animals: The Rise of the Animal Protection Movement. Henry Holt, 2008. Dovetailing nicely with Erica Fudge’s Perceiving Animals, Shevelow discusses the implications of a rigidly anthropocentric ideology in early modern England. Activities such as bull and bear-baiting, hunting, ratting and dog fighting, as well as practices related to the use of animals for food and labour are graphically described and contextualized within a framework of human supremacy. Shevelow also discusses the many recorded instances of monstrous births in the period and the manner in which they destabilized the boundaries between humans and animals.

Cressy, David. Travesties and Transgressions in Tudor and Stuart England. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Cressy’s work delves into unusual incidents which were reported in popular literature in early modern England. The author investigates how communities reacted to occurrences which ran against social norms and expectations, and the manner in which reportage influenced those reactions. The existence of monstrous births was widely written about in broadsheets and pamphlets and elicited a variety of commentary about the deeper political, spiritual and social significance of such occurrences.

Crawford, Julie. Marvelous Protestantism: Monstrous Births in Post-Reformation England. Baltimore, The John Hopkins University Press, 2005. Much like Cressy’s work on the topic, Crawford approaches monstrous births from the viewpoint of the reader of the popular literature of the period. The author considers them a means by which the private beliefs of post-Reformation society are illuminated for the dissemination of present-day scholarship.

Boucé, P.G. “Imagination, pregnant women and monsters in eighteenth-century England and France.” in G.S. Rousseau and Roy Porter, eds. Sexual Underworlds of the Enlightenment. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988. Boucé’s study of monstrous births focuses on the minds of pregnant women and the ability of the imagination to influence an unborn child’s physical form. The author includes anecdotal accounts of such births complemented by excerpts from literary works which addressed the topic.

Other works of interest

Burns, William E. An Age of Wonders: Prodigies, Politics and Providence in England 1657-1727. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002.
Gowing, Laura. “Secret births and infanticide in seventeenth-century England.” Past & Present 156 (August 1997) : 87-115.
Howard, Sharon. “Imagining the pain and peril of seventeenth century childbirth: danger and deliverance in the making of an early modern world.” Social History of Medicine 16.3 (2003) : 367-382.
Younquist, Paul. Monstrosities: Bodies and British Romanticism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003.

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