A. W. Bates. Emblematic Monsters: Unnatural Conceptions and Deformed Births in Early Modern Europe. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005. 334 pp. $85.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-90-420-1862-4.

Reviewed by Kathleen Crowther (Department of the History of Science, University of Oklahoma)
Published on H-German (June, 2006)

Embryology and Eschatology

Emblematic Monsters surveys accounts of human "monstrous" births produced in Europe between 1500 and 1700. Bates draws on a wide variety of sources, including broadsides and ballads in various vernaculars, books on monsters by early modern scholars such as Ulisse Aldrovandi and reports of monstrous births in the journals of learned societies, such as the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. A detailed appendix gives a chronological listing of almost 250 monstrous births between 1503 and 1700. The breadth of the author's source material is impressive, ranging across multiple genres and languages. Bates is clearly familiar with the burgeoning literature on monsters, marvels, wonders and curiosity in early modern Europe, making his notes and bibliography useful resources. Unfortunately, Bates does not engage with this literature in a way that allows him to make an original contribution to it. Certainly, the central argument of the book, "that accounts of monstrous births were descriptions of actual events that were of interest not merely as news, as wonders or as part of the historical record, but because they were thought to have a deeper meaning," will not strike historians of early modern science, medicine or religion as novel (p. 11).

Even as a summary and synthesis of work on monsters and marvels, the book has some significant flaws. Most notably, Bates presents overly simplistic treatments of early modern theories of reproduction. To take just a few examples: Bates frequently equates early modern understandings of conception and generation with Aristotle's explanations of these processes. While Aristotelian views of reproduction were unquestionably extremely influential in the early modern period, they coexisted and competed with other theories, such as those of Hippocrates and Galen. Bates characterizes the eighteenth-century theory of preformation as the view that "the form of the embryo existed in the semen [sic]" (p. 116). Actually, a fierce dispute persisted between those who thought that there were preformed human beings in eggs (ovists) and those who thought they were in sperm (spermists), with ovists in the majority.[1] Bates touches only briefly on the notion of maternal imagination, a subject that loomed much larger in early modern theories of generation than he acknowledges.[2] This neglect is not merely a matter of getting some of the technical details wrong. Bates asserts in his introduction that "observers [of monstrous births] were not concerned about ... their physical causes" (p. 12). In fact, many of the sources Bates discusses do indeed address the causes of monstrous births, and their explanations are embedded in more general theories of reproduction. Bates's failure to take these theories seriously weakens his analysis.

The one novel aspect of this book is the retrospective diagnoses of early modern monstrous births. To take an example at random, Bates labels a monstrous birth with two heads and ambiguous genitalia from Tübingen in 1597 "parapagus dibrachius dipus conjoined twins" (p. 244). Bates argues that the possibility of applying modern diagnostic categories to early modern monstrous births provides strong evidence that such births were real rather than fictional events. This approach, however, does not contribute to an understanding of the meanings of monstrous births in the past. Taken too far, it actually detracts from such an understanding. For example, in discussing the birth of a three-faced baby in 1581, in which the mother was seventy-seven years old, Bates comments that, "we do not believe that a 77-year-old can bear a child and [sic] any more than did the reader of 1581" (p. 176). I see no compelling reason for assuming that a story about a seventy-seven year old woman having a baby would have been dismissed out of hand by a sixteenth-century reader. In the context of early modern understandings of female reproductive processes, such an event would be highly unlikely but not necessarily impossible. And of course, it had good biblical precedent (cf. Genesis 21). This is not to argue that early modern people were more gullible than we, but simply to assert that they did not use modern categories, theories and explanations to make sense of their world.

One very interesting aspect of the book is Bates's suggestion that Catholics and Protestants understood monstrous births differently. Individual monstrous births might be interpreted differently by different religious groups. So, for example, in 1523, Martin Luther interpreted the birth of a deformed "monk-calf" as a divine critique of monastic orders. But his Catholic opponents read it as a symbol of "Luther's own abortive monastic career" (p. 52). But Bates notes that on a more general level, Protestants were more likely to see monstrous births as evidence of God's direct intervention in the natural world, while Catholics were more likely to see them as the result of natural forces (p. 65). Unfortunately, this is not a point that Bates develops in any detail.

Notes

[1]. Clara Pinto-Correia, The Ovary of Eve: Egg and Sperm and Preformation (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1997).

[2]. Marie Hélène Huet, Monstrous Imagination (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993).

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Citation: Kathleen Crowther. Review of Bates, A. W., Emblematic Monsters: Unnatural Conceptions and Deformed Births in Early Modern Europe. H-German, H-Net Reviews. June, 2006.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=11902

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