Des monstres et prodiges by Ambroise Paré (review)

A pioneer of evidence-based medicine, especially as practised in the theatre of war, Ambroise Paré is commonly known as the father of modern surgery. He also witnesses to a fascination with monsters — their generation, shape, and potential significance — which he shared with both his fellow-doctor Rabelais, and his direct contemporary Montaigne (who silently reworks examples from Paré's chapter on the power of the imagination in his account of embodied cognition in the Essais, I, 21). Paré's Des monstres (and prodigies … and hermaphrodites, devils, witches, and charlatans) represents the most sustained early modern French vernacular exploration into nature's capacity to generate abnormalities in sea and sky, above and below ground, in humans as in other animals; it is, as Michel Jeanneret here rightly suggests, 'un hymne à la vie' (p. 33). First published in 1573 (Paris: André Wechel), the treatise initially formed part of a small volume investigating aspects of reproduction; it then went through several more — successively revised, ever grander — editions in Paré's lifetime, culminating in the version offered here: the landmark 1585 edition, richly illustrated with almost eighty striking images, in which the treatise is the twenty-fifth of the twenty-eight 'Livres' that constitute the 1250 in-folio pages of Paré's Œuvres (Paris: Gabriel Buon). The images, like the hundreds of examples Paré (re)deploys in his text, sometimes represent what he himself witnessed, and at others derive from the many books, pamphlets, and canards concerning anomalous events, which circulated across the period. Paré clearly imitates as much as he innovates. But as Jeanneret stresses in his engaging and informative (if slightly hagiographical) Introduction, the monumental 1585 edition, a revision of an earlier complete works (1575), itself translated into Latin (in 1582), signals both its author's own personal triumph over his early detractors and the establishment of the learned credentials of his hitherto artisanal craft. The publication of Des monstres et prodiges in the 'Folio classique poche' series is itself a further landmark: a welcome sign of our own changing critical times. Initially the treatise was something of a scandal, with its author execrated in Latin superlatives ('impudentissimus, imperitissimus, maxime temerarius', p. 9) as a man 'most impudent, inexperienced, and ill-informed, as well as altogether reckless' for publishing discussion of such matters in the vernacular. By the end of the seventeenth century, it had become a little-read historical curiosity: a Borgesian emblem of the curiosity cabinets with which medical men and their patrons adorn their studies or entertain themselves and their guests. But the recent reinvention of the histories of medicine, the marvellous, and the book, and the intersection of such histories with the hybrid discourses of first New Historicism, and now the medical humanities, has led to a welcome reappraisal of Paré'sownwork, and, morebroadly, of the place and significance of monsters in early modern culture. Jeanneret's fine new edition responds to this rich context: his light-touch notes make judicious use of Jean Céard's magisterial critical edition (Geneva: Droz, 1971), and his adventurous bibliographical suggestions offer Folio's non-specialist readers tempting pointers to further discussion both of Paré's particular monsters, and of those that (still) roam, further afield.