Content area
Full Text
Laura Lunger Knoppers and Joan B. Landes, eds. Monstrous Bodies: Political Monstrosities in Early Modern Europe. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004. xi + 304 pp. + 40 illus. $.59.95. Review by LAURA FEITZINGER BROWN, CONVERSE COLLEGE.
Laura Lunger Knoppers and Joan B. Landes have assembled a fascinating interdisciplinary anthology of essays about interactions between the concept of monstrosity and ideas of the body politic in early modern Europe. Using eight essays by well-regarded scholars, the book pairs essays according to related themes. Covering texts from Germany, Austria, Holland, France, Spain, and England, the book also contains the editors' introduction, an afterword by Andrew Curran, nearly fifty pages of endnotes, short bios of contributors, and an index. The collection features a wide range of relevant illustrations, such as woodcuts of grossly deformed "monstrous births," photographs of early modern preserved anatomical specimens, and politically charged prints from the French Revolution of guillotined heads and of cannibals. Essays vary in approach, with some focused on particular texts and others offering a broader discussion of one angle on politics and monstrosity. Despite some problems discussed below, overall the collection is thought provoking, well researched, and creative, likely to inspire more fine interdisciplinary work.
After a helpful introduction that summarizes the articles and recent scholarship, the book opens with Part 1, "Monstrous Races, Boundaries, and Nationhood," the focus of paired essays by Peter Burke and David Cressy. Burke's essay, "Frontiers of the Monstrous: Perceiving National Characters in Early Modern Europe," examines the intersection of beliefs about "monstrous races" and stereotypes of national character. Burke gives examples of ways in which one European nation used the idea of the monstrous or the bestial to characterize other European nationalities. Cressy's compelling piece, "Lamentable, Strange, and Wonderful: Headless Monsters in the English Revolution," focuses on two English pamphlets from the 164Os, each an account of a woman bearing a headless child. Both pamphlets claim the mother rebelliously caused her child's deformity. Since one pamphlet blames the mother for resisting the Church of England, and the other condemns the mother for resisting the Puritans, Cressy concludes that both pamphlets fed the appetite for Civil War propaganda. He adds, "Both stories drew attention to the problem of controlling unruly women at a time when patriarchal...