Monsters and their Meanings in Early Modern Culture

Abstract

To call something ‘monstrous’ in the mid-sixteenth century is, more often than not, to wonder at its enormous size: it is to call to mind something like a whale; by the late seventeenth century ‘monstrous’ is more likely to denote hidden intentions, unspoken desires. Several shifts are at work in this word history, as in what Shakespeare's Othello terms the ‘mighty magic’ of stories about monsters. These shifts can be described in a number of ways. The clearest and most compelling is the migration of monsters from natural history to moral philosophy, from the margins of maps to a central role in the drama of human motivation, of sexual and political identity. A (richly illustrated) meditation on monsters of various descriptions, from natural phenomena to members of the same human family, this study offers a new account of the place of monsters in the early modern imagination. Literature makes a particular kind of sense when studied in relation to what anthropologists call ‘thick descriptions’ of context. This study relates the peculiar questions and insights proposed by literary writing to those produced by historians of science, of religious conflict (this was a time of civil war and persistent rebellion), as of printing, philosophy, natural history, and medicine. At its centre are readings of major works of early modern French literature — from Rabelais to Racine, from the 1540s to the early 1690s — in which monsters do meaningful work. From these focal points, digressions are undertaken through the archives of the history of medicine as of politics, the visual representation of monsters, and the reception of classical antiquity. Each new chapter establishes the contours of the intellectual context within which change takes place, and so leads us to better understand the issues and questions raised throughout. Charting a process of sustained and distinctive transformation, this book seeks to understand the cultural work performed by monsters in early modern Europe: monsters in books, in paintings, onstage, and in the street; in the study, as in the state, and the self.

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