Monstrous Bodies/Political Monstrosities in Early Modern Europe (review)

The history of teratology has become an increasingly important locus commune in which have converged an equally remarkable number of interests. The histories of science and medicine, of literature and art, seem to have turned simultaneously to the study of different forms of classification and representation of those phenomena traditionally associated with the world of monsters in general and with their effects in the individual or collective consciousness in particular. The ongoing publications of works De Monstris may be very well explained by both historiographical developments or by the massive presence of primary terato-logical sources. From the perspectives opened by the works of Michel Foucault, Mary Douglas, Mikhail Bakhtin, and by the detailed analysis of, among others, Denis Todd, Marie-Hélène Huet, Michael Hagner, Katharine Park, and Lorraine Daston, many other contributions have been added to an almost inexhaustible field of research.

Monstrous Bodies/Political Monstrosities explores the presence of monsters during the early modern period within the boundaries of science, religion, politics, and ethnography. The book explains how representations of bodily aberrations were meant to serve the purpose of defining religious boundaries or cultural identities at quite the same time in which strange or rare creatures were understood and classified by natural philosophers. It looks at monsters as symbolic representations of political confrontation and religious debate rather than at the issues related to their veracity, their scientific use, or the mechanism employed to grant their existence. The book makes clear that the understanding and representations of bodily aberrations did not imply to take distance from moral judgments, political values, or ideological biases. Though some contributors seem still to endorse the "naturalization model," the editors do not hesitate to call into question those older teleological narratives. The social and scientific preoccupation with physical deformity in the West from the Renaissance to the Romanticism — betweenthe monster of Ravenna looked at by Hampton, and the scientific teratology of Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, between the Völkertafel examined by Burke, Shakespeare's Richard III, and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein — cannot be explained by a single narrative, either based on naturalization or in an equally progressive succession of emotions. The political, religious, or literary discourses embodied in textual or visual representations of the abnormal may be better understood as part of nonlinear processes of symbolic reassignation or reappropriation.

The eight essays contained in the book are paired in four different sections. In part 1, "Monstrous Races, Boundaries and Nationhood," Peter Burke and David Cressy's papers shed light on how monstrous bodies were used to define national identities or to express female resistance against power structures. The second section, "Apocalypticism, Bestiality and Monstrous Polemics," looks at the significance acquired by monstrous bodies in political and religious confrontations. Both R. Po-Chia Hsia and Laura Knoppers place the proliferation of monsters in the context of political turmoil or religious schisms. In part 3, "Medical Knowledge, Grotesque Anatomies, and the Body Politic," science and medicine converge with the aberration in the body politic. The anatomical uses of monsters among contending parties in revolutionary France studied by John B. Landes and the intimate alignment of monstrous and medicine explored by Marie-Hélène Huet provide a vivid account of the revolutionary potential of the monstrous bodies. The fourth pair of essays moves into the realm of literary representations. This last section, "Displacing Monsters: Sign, Allegory and Myth," explores the tension between monsters and literary textual traditions in the context of the early Renaissance and in the Enlightenment. Timothy Hampton looks at the contradictions between analogy, allegory, and similitude in the representations of monstrous bodies in sixteenth-century French literature, while David Armitage provides a new interpretation of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein's creature as a descendant of early modern myths. Both essays avoid classical readings of Rabelais's Quart Livre and...