How to Approach a Monster: A Comparison of Different Approaches in the Historiography of Early Modern Monster Literature

Abstract

Abstract This essay won the 2007 History Compass Graduate Essay Prize, Europe Section. Monsters multiplied over the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in scholastic treatises, wonderbooks and cheap pamphlets. A Plymouth preacher complained that ‘the common sort make no further use of prodigies and strange births, than as a matter of wonder and table‐talk’. They should, he said, ‘look higher, and take notice of the special hand of God’. Idle wonder or moral purpose; there was more than one way to look at monsters in early modern Europe. The same might be said of historical approach. Historians have used monster literature to reflect on issues of difference, morality and control, conceptions of the supernatural and the dynamics of print culture. This article looks at the historiography of monsters or monstrosity and considers how modernising narratives might continue to influence the direction of historical enquiry. With a focus on particular historical accounts, I ask whether a return to the textual content and functions of these sources might shed new light on old questions or modify the ways we ask them.

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