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  • Monstrous Bodies/Political Monstrosities in Early Modern Europe
  • Ruth Gilbert
Laura Lunger Knoppers and Joan B. Landes , eds. Monstrous Bodies/Political Monstrosities in Early Modern Europe. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2004. xi + 304 pp. Ill. $59.95, £34.50 (cloth, 0-8014-4176-5), $22.50, £12.95 (paperbound, 0-8014-8901-6).

"Monsters blur boundaries . . . transgressing, violating, polluting, and mixing what ought to be kept apart" (p. 6). This point frames this stimulating and well-judged volume. It also explains the pervasive interest in representations of the monstrous body within early modern cultural studies over recent years. Cultural historians, political historians, and medical historians, as well as scholars of literature and visual representation, have all turned to the diverse representations of monstrous bodies in early modern culture and beyond in order to ask questions about how the anomalous defines the normative.

In their introduction the editors acknowledge the significance of Katharine Park and Lorraine Daston's groundbreaking 1981 essay on the development of attitudes toward so-called monstrous births, but they also outline the way in which Park and Daston came to shift their focus in their important 1998 study [End Page 327] Wonders and the Order of Nature: they reformulated their earlier teleological model, which charted a progressive development from superstition to scientific rationalization, and posited instead a revised focus on the more complex emotional and epistemological intersections between horror, pleasure, and repugnance in response to anomalous forms. Knoppers and Landes rightly commend Daston and Park's "rich . . . account of the relationship between wonder and science in the early modern period" (p. 11), but suggest that there is still more that can be explored about "the wide range of metaphorical and political uses of the monstrous" (p. 11). This serious and focused volume proves them to be right. The volume consists of eight paired essays that explore the ways in which the monstrous or grotesque body has been deployed in political, polemical, and rhetorical terms. Some important work has recently been produced in this area but the essays in this volume, written by well-respected and important scholars in their fields, contribute to and extend current debates in new and provocative ways.

The first pair of essays, by Peter Burke and David Cressy, shows how classical teratology was reformulated in early modern Europe. Burke explores the ways in which classical ideas about monstrous races were politicized in order to establish boundaries between European nation-states, while Cressy discusses the use of monstrous births in the political propaganda of the English Revolution. The following two essays, by R. Po-chia Hsia and Laura Knoppers, examine the monster as divine portent or apocalyptic omen by exploring the ways in which monstrous bodies were read as signs in times of political, religious, or social unrest. The third pair of essays explores how discourses of science, medicine, and anatomy have responded to physical abnormality. Marie-Hélène Huet, in "Monstrous Medicine," presents a persuasive argument that medicine is itself implicated in producing the monstrous. Joan B. Landes focuses on the ways in which anatomical procedures link to polemics in Revolutionary France; as the editors point out in their introduction, this essay also "adds to the volume's ongoing interest in the monster as visual phenomenon" (p. 18), and it is worth mentioning at this point that the inclusion of a lavish range of illustrative material (forty plates) adds to the overall achievement of this collection. The two final essays are concerned with issues of representation in literary texts. Timothy Hampton discusses the tension between analogy and allegory in sixteenth-century French literature, while David Armitage places Mary Shelley's romantic text, Frankenstein, in the context of early modern mythography.

The volume is scholarly, well-organized, and coherent. This is a book that sets out to tell us about the idea of the monstrous body rather than the history of medical practice. In focusing on discourse rather than biology, it presents a timely and impressive contribution to an ongoing area of cultural interest.

Ruth Gilbert
University College, Winchester
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