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Of Monkey Girls and a Hog-Faced Gentlewoman: Marvel in Fairy Tales, Fairgrounds, and Cabinets of Curiosities
- Marvels & Tales
- Wayne State University Press
- Volume 19, Number 1, 2005
- pp. 67-85
- 10.1353/mat.2005.0010
- Article
- Additional Information
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In sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe, hairy girls made medical, court, fairy-tale, and fairground fame simultaneously. Tiny nut boots decorated fairy feet in a tale by d'Aulnoy as well as the shelves of an English cabinet of curiosities. Ballads borrowed the structure of the folktale and sold a pig-faced girl like a fairy-tale princess. The article looks at cross-disciplinary intersections where anomalous bodies became tellable, collectible, and commercial. It locates the marvel of monkey girls and a hog-faced gentlewoman within the strategies of knowledge, the cultural practices of display, and the pleasures of tale-telling that marked early modern Europe.