More Pictures!! Here's the title page to the incest pamphlet I mentioned in class, along with the fun quote about the monstrous child born:
“the head of it was longer than the head of other children…both the eyes were standing far out of the head…the nose was depressed flat into the face…the mouth was much smaller than ordinary…the hands had no thumbs at all…there appeared no evident sign of the sex, either man or woman…the toes and fingers were covered over with one skin” (B2v).
3 comments:
Thanks for this, Sarah.
Historian David Cressy has a book that examines various accounts of beastiality, monstrous births, and other bizzaro transgressive bodily/sexual stuff from the period. He pays special attention to the narrative qualities of the accounts and trials, working out social and political readings from there. My favorite is Agnes Bowker's cat:
"What a world is this? It is marvelous, it is monstrous! I hear say there is a young woman, born in the town of Harborough, one Bowker, a butcher's daughter, which of late, God wot, is brought to bed of a cat, or have delivered a cat, or, if you will, is the mother of a cat! Oh God!"
-William Bullein, "Dialogue Against the Fever Pestilence" (1578)
Cressy, David. "Travesties and Transgressions in Tudor and Stuart England: Tales of Discord and Dissension." Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000.
That sounds amazing. I've really only heard of the more sensational cases of monstrous births that were revealed as hoaxes (like Mary Toft giving birth to rabbits in the 1720s). I was thinking of earlier examples (if there were any) as I read 'Tis Pity. It seems that the book you mentioned deals with "maternal imagination" as well, in which the mother, while pregnant, thinks or says something that causes her child to become deformed in some way.
My very favorite monstrous birth:
From "A declaration of a strange and wonderfull monster" (1646) in which a mother, "a Popish gentlewoman" wishes "rather to bear a childe without a head then a Roundhead". When she does have the baby, of course it is born with "the face of it upon the breast, and without a head."
Early modern rationale is an amazing thing sometimes. Here’s the title page of the pamphlet, although I sort of defaced it and that’s the only version I have. Either way, the image is interesting:
http://tinyurl.com/2syjvx
On monstrous births, see also Julie Crawford's Marvelous Protestantism (JHU, 2006). A rule of thumb: if you find yourself pregnant in 1576, do not spend a lot of time visualizing or looking at pictures of frogs.
Post a Comment