Fairy Tale Queens: Representations of Early Modern Queenship (9 page)

First, inasmuch as the queen and her circle are horrified at the sight or news of their abnormal offspring, that their existence is so readily believed suggests that the notion of monstrous births was not considered entirely preposterous. Magnanini argues that Straparola’s work includes numerous wonders that characters simply accept as “quotidian,” but “none of these marvels evokes the intense horror and moral anxiety” of the animal-human hybrid.
¹⁸
Indeed, monstrous births generate an amplified dismay in the tales by other authors as well, but I would also argue that in spite of the horrified reactions, the unquestioning credulity also suggests an awareness that monstrous births can and do occur: after all, “an infinite number of women” have given birth to monstrosities. The characters’ response is not disbelief in the possibility of such a disastrous event as much as shock that the atrocity has happened to them.

Second, anxiety about the queen’s reputation, and by association, the public image of the king and his court, was paramount and always superseded any concern for the monstrous offspring. Third, just as the conception for childless queens occurs in a female-dominated sanctuary, the monstrous childbirth takes place in the absence of the king and in a “women only” space where queen mothers, sisters, midwives, ladies-in-waiting, or fairies attend the queen. This female community can include kindly, well-intentioned assistance or malevolent intervention, but male influence is noticeably absent. As we will discuss, this absence is mirrored in early modern childbirth practices, but in both cases, the ritualized privacy created an atmosphere susceptible to rumor.

Finally, in both types of tales—the actual and the alleged monster births—the queen has seemingly done nothing to deserve her fate. Certainly, she has committed a dramatic crime of omission: she has failed to fulfill her one purpose, to conceive and deliver a safe succession. But fairy tales are driven by plot, rather than character motivation or interiority; in the absence of explanation we are left to wonder whether the queen is at all responsible for the monstrous failed birth or is simply a victim of a random act of nature or divine meddling. To this end, early modern reproductive and childbirth theories, popular interest in the monstrous birth, and the examples of two early modern queens are significant, for just as fairy tales can offer us ways to read the lives of early modern queens, the historical record can return us to a deeper reading of the fairy tales.

Early Modern Interest in Monstrous Births

Monstrous births were not just products of the literary imagination; they were a notable and newsworthy sensation in early modern culture. The early modern period was marked by an infatuation with the marvelous and the monstrous: celestial apparitions, medicinal gemstones, murderous fish, bleeding grapevines, and a hog-faced woman from the Netherlands are but a few of the wonders that captivated an audience eager to be dazzled.
¹⁹
Some people were fortunate enough to witness such phenomena firsthand, but most relied on the myriad publications that profited from a growing readership’s interest in the unusual and the exotic. Rarities such as streaking comets or physical abnormalities were verifiable natural occurrences, whereas others were outlandish fabrications.

Among all of the categories of the marvelous—natural or manmade, real or fictitious—the monstrous birth generated particular enthusiasm. A two-headed baby reported in Germany; a winged and horned creature known as the Ravenna Monster; all manner of conjoined twins; a baby born with demonic features dubbed the Monster of Krakow; and numerous other anomalous offspring were reported in rich textual and visual detail. Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park suggest that “perhaps more than any other kind of marvel,” the monstrous birth “aroused passions and mobilized interests among Europeans of every social class” in the early modern period.
²⁰
Interest in the aberrant birth cut across genres as well as class: private and popular works—particularly broadsheets, ballads, wonder books, sermons, diaries, and wills—as well as the more academic medical treatises, midwifery and obstetric manuals, and philosophical tracts all recount stories of women delivering unusual and freakish babies.
²¹
These works often borrowed heavily from one another, resulting in some redundancy, but there was no scarcity of material: A. W. Bates catalogs almost 100 publications on the subject, which were published in Europe or England between the mid-sixteenth to the mid-seventeenth century, and David Cressy lists “more than two dozen publications describing monster births” during the same period and claims that “several more are known to have existed.”
²²

On the continent, among the more widely read publications chronicling monstrous births were Lutheran physician Jacob Rueff’s midwifery manual, 
De Conceptu et Generatione Hominis
 (1554), translated later into English as 
The Expert Midwife
; the German humanist Konrad Lycosthenes’s 
Prodigiorum ac ostentorum chronicon
 (
Chronicle of Prodigies and Portents,
 1557); and the enormously popular French
Histoires Prodigieuses
 (
Marvelous Stories,
 1560–1568) 
,
 a series of six volumes by Pierre Boaistuau and a cadre of other authors, all reporting actual deformities alongside the preposterous. French surgeon Ambroise Paré’s 
Des monstres et prodigies
 (
Monsters and Prodigies,
 1573) similarly chronicled both the provable and the improbable. Paré was as inventive and liberal in speculating on the causes of monstrous births as he was in describing them. In Italy, philosopher Bendetto Varchi published lectures in which he described foul monsters as the result of the “sins of whoever makes them” (1560); Tommaso Garzoni’s 
Il serraglio degli stupor del mondo
 (
A Collection of the World’s
 
Marvels
, 1613) amassed an extensive encyclopedia of monstrous progeny; and physician Fortunio Liceti’s medical treatise 
De monstrorum natura
 (
On the Nature
 
of Monsters
, 1616) advanced more scientific explanations for abnormal births.

Many of these works, originally written in Latin, German, French, and Italian, were translated into English and enjoyed multiple editions. England also produced its own share of monstrous births reports from Thomas Lupton’s 
A Thousand Notable Things
 (1586), a hodgepodge compendium of oddities, home remedies, and monstrous birth accounts to Francis Bacon’s call in 
Novum Organon
 (1620) for a “compilation...of all monsters and prodigious births of nature” to physician John Sadler’s 
The Sick Woman’s Private Looking-Glasse
 (1636), which announces the many frightful ways women’s ill-fated wombs could produce monstrosities. Even the spate of childbirth guides that were published in the seventeenth century and were intended to promote healthy deliveries could not resist warnings about aberrant births.
²³
As David Cressy points out, “Early modern midwifery manuals...gave graphic space to the most gruesome abominations of natural abortions, mooncalves, molas, and monsters. Their illustrations reached prurient as well as professional eyes, and helped people visualize the worst that nature could threaten,” thus exacerbating the already significant fears of childbirth.

From our contemporary vantage point, the long list of monstrous-birth literature appears to cover a broad spectrum from real, if exaggerated, attempts to chronicle physical deformities to blatantly spectacular creations of tabloid journalism. Scholars have posited a number of explanations for the exceptional proliferation in monstrous or imperfect birth narratives in the early modern period. A. W. Bates, a physician, argues that the accounts of monstrous births represented genuine attempts by the authors to accurately report real occurrences of birth defects in the absence of the scientific language and expertise that we would now employ. Bates acknowledges that some of the monstrous birth accounts were most likely fabricated, but he argues that they were generally efforts made in good faith to accurately report congenital malformations: for example, an early modern description of a two-headed child would be described today as dicephalus, or a “rabbit face” may have signaled a cleft palate. After a review of both the pitfalls and the advantages of “retrospective diagnoses,” Bates includes an appendix that matches possible diagnoses with early modern descriptions of monstrous creatures.
²⁴

Another factor contributing to the early modern monster-birth craze was the advance in travel and exploration that encouraged reportage of prodigies, though Daston and Park distinguish between accounts of exotica and the more localized, individual wonders that the monstrous birth represents. According to Daston and Park, interest in aberrant births peaked in response to specific social and political circumstances: “Feeding on the anxieties and aspirations of the moment, it drew its power from conditions of acute instability: foreign invasion, religious conflict, civil strife.”
²⁵
The Italian wars at the turn of the sixteenth century, the early 1520s upheaval of the German Reformation, and Elizabeth I’s accession to the English throne in 1558 were all accompanied by frenzied interest in monstrous births.

Among various political and social upheavals, scholars generally cite the Reformation as being the most influential in connection with the monstrous birth phenomenon. In her study of changing attitudes toward childbirth before and after the Reformation, Mary Fissell argues that in a predominantly Catholic world, “the womb had been considered marvelous in a context in which women were taught to connect their own pregnancies with that of the Virgin Mary. When women were no longer encouraged to identify with the Virgin, some of the miraculous connotations of conception and pregnancy faded.”
²⁶
Whereas a pre-Reformation ethos had encouraged a more sacred and empowered concept of motherhood, post-Reformation views focused on the labor pains of childbirth as punishment for Eve’s transgression and the potential of “the womb going bad” and producing monstrosities. Julie Crawford also examines the relationship between Protestantism and the fascination with monstrous births and argues that the developing printing industry’s exploitation of the public’s appetite for sensational stories made it possible for reformers to use those narratives as cautionary tales. As Crawford points out, “Many of the writers and publishers of monster pamphlets were Protestant ministers or proselytizers, and they clearly saw the production and circulation of such marvelous stories in keeping with their reforming mission.”
²⁷
Crawford also argues that the various monster-birth stories reveal less about a monolithic English Protestant culture than about localized circumstances and crises.

Actual or fictitious, the startling number of monstrous-birth reports expresses a broad cultural anxiety regarding women’s bodies and reproduction, whether in popular broadsides or in medical treatises. Whereas some authors saw the monstrous birth as a random act of nature and others as God’s punishment for communal or individual sins, blame is overwhelmingly attributed to women and their failings in the form of sexual transgressions, crimes of the imagination, or subversion of male authority. Crawford argues that in general, monstrous births were not seen as appearing randomly and unmediated; rather, they “are made, and understood to be made, in women’s bodies. It is 
women
 whose acts and behaviors produce monsters. In stories of monstrous births, the crises of post-Reformation England occur, not in an abstract collective body politic, but in the disparate and gendered bodies of English believers.”
²⁸

Not surprisingly, the sins of the mother that were thought to be responsible for monstrous births were primarily of a sexual nature. Illicit or incontinent sexual behavior of any sort could bear ill fruit. Crawford analyzes a number of monstrous-birth reports and notes, “For many early modern people, monstrous births were public exposures of their mothers’ hidden or as-yet-unpunished desires, disorders, and crimes.”
²⁹
This wide net covered wandering women, servant girls, betrothed women who broke marriage contracts, allegedly sexually transgressive women—in short, women on the margins of conventional behaviors that went beyond the purview of male authority were blamed for their monstrous progeny. Many of the monstrous-birth stories may have, as David Cressy suggests, provided cover for illegitimate births and infanticide.
³⁰

Desires, or sins of the imagination, were as dangerous as actual crimes, or sins of commission. Reproductive theory maintained that the vulnerable pregnant body was susceptible to external influences and events as well as to the woman’s own unstable desires and emotions, all of which could imprint on the child in utero and result in malformations and monstrous births. Marie-Hélène Huet’s work,
Monstrous Imagination,
 focuses on this power of the mother’s inner life and demonstrates that “a remarkably persistent line of thought argued that monstrous progeny resulted from the disorder of the maternal imagination.”
³¹
A woman who had gazed at a portrait of St. John the Baptist dressed in animal skins later gave birth to a baby covered in hair or the woman who gave birth to a frog-faced child after holding a frog in her hand to ward off a fever—these types of tales circulated among the ancients and remained common lore in the early modern period.
³²
Montaigne, one of many authors who repeated the popular St. John imprinting story, insisted that “We know by experience that women transmit marks of their fancies to the bodies of the children they carry in their womb.”
³³
The worst of the maternal “fancies” was sexual desire, particularly of a bestial nature. That the mother must have had excessive ardor or entertained longings for bestial copulation during her pregnancy was seen as an obvious explanation for the monstrous child. As Huet argues, “Instead of reproducing the father’s image, as nature commands, the monstrous child bore witness to the violent desires that moved the mother…The resulting offspring carried the marks of her whims and fancy rather than the recognizable features of its legitimate genitor. The monster thus erased paternity and proclaimed the dangerous power of the female imagination.”
³⁴
The affront is not only in the monstrous creation itself but in that the means of production were assumed to radically undermine male authority and paternal claims.