Sometime around 1537, Petrus Gonzales was born on Tenerife with a rare genetic
disorder that made hair grow all over his face and across his body. He was
recognized as one of the “wild” or “dog-faced” men believed to exist at the
outer reaches of the world, and was sent as a curiosity to the French court
of Henry II and Catherine de’ Medici. There, he was raised as a courtier,
married a smooth-faced woman and had at least seven children with her. Most
of them shared his furriness and also became minor court celebrities, but
eventually settled together in an Italian village and fell from historical
record.
Merry Wiesner-Hanks in The Marvelous Hairy Girls has now carefully
reconstructed the story of the Gonzales family, and especially of the three
hairy daughters, Maddalena, Francesca and Antonietta. Although the sources
are sparse, they include evocative paintings and medical records; and
Wiesner-Hanks makes the most of them by sensitively drawing out the
attitudes behind the artistic, religious and scientific interest in the
hairy family. In her hands, the contemporary reactions to the Gonzales
sisters become a kaleidoscope which offers a beguilingly rich and in-depth
view of sixteenth-century European society, mentality and beliefs.
Though much of the background material is well known, Wiesner-Hanks expertly
summarizes it from a position taking in the latest scholarship, and makes it
not only accessible but highly enjoyable to specialists and non-specialists
alike. She wonders, for example, what might have persuaded Catherine
Gonzales to marry a “monster” like Petrus. As there are no direct records,
she sketches what sixteenth-century women might have expected of marriage,
giving concise descriptions of the changes in wedding customs from informal
agreements between a man and a woman to public social events, and of the
role of romantic love. She plausibly concludes that Petrus’s guaranteed
income as a court curiosity probably played a part, as well as perhaps love
or tolerance or “Beauty and the Beast”-type fantasies.
Similarly, the fact that Petrus Gonzales was represented at court as a
Guanche, a sheep-fur-clad native of the Canaries rather than a descendant of
the European immigrants, gives occasion for a brief history of the
colonization of these islands, which resulted in a wish to construct a
native origin for what was, by the sixteenth century, a mixed ethnic group.
The inclusion of the Gonzales’ images in collections of monsters or
curiosities allows Wiesner-Hanks to discuss medieval and early modern
attitudes to unusual creatures, characterized by an acute awareness that
humans are not fundamentally different from other animals. When she
describes the birth of the couple’s hairy children, she delves deep into
Renaissance birthing practices and theories, including the medical opinion
that “monstrous births” are sometimes due to the mother seeing something
startling at the moment of conception or during pregnancy, which impresses
its shape on the foetus. The fact that such traits could persist across
generations was ascribed not to genes but to nature’s drive to replicate its
forms.
Like many senior historians, Wiesner-Hanks has adopted an emotive, literary
style. Instead of referencing every statement and giving only the “facts”,
she aims at a more general audience with gracious, light-hearted prose, and
replaces extensive footnotes with brief recommendations for further reading
on each of her topics. The book’s handsome looks (somewhat marred by the low
quality of the illustrations) contribute to its wide appeal. An openness to
an unusual topic of historical inquiry – to monsters rather than just to the
kings who owned them, the artists who painted them, the scientists who
studied them or the theologians who explained them – is accompanied by an
openness to unusual methods of presenting its results. Historians of
monstrosity such as Robert Bartlett, Caroline Walker Bynum, Lorraine Daston,
Katherine Park and now Wiesner-Hanks are pioneering, at least implicitly, an
attitude that could serve as a model for historical endeavour in general.
Rather than treating their “monsters” as passive objects of scientific
analysis or of gawping astonishment, their work is characterized first and
foremost by respect. Wiesner-Hanks is unwavering in her thoughtful
presentation of the Gonzales sisters as individuals who can look back at us
across time and challenge our own perceptions of disabilities and disorders.
The latter owe more to the Renaissance than we might think: although large
quantities of facial and body hair are now perceived mainly as a medical
problem rather than as a topic of philosophical and artistic reflection, it
was named “Ambras syndrome” by nineteenth-century medical doctors after the
palace where most of the Gonzales’ portraits hung. The Gonzales’ history
casts a long shadow, and Merry Wiesner-Hanks has brought it into deservedly
sharp relief.
Another famous “monster” briefly mentioned by Wiesner-Hanks and discussed by
Jennifer Spinks in her book on Monstrous Births and Visual Culture in
Sixteenth-Century Germany is the monk-calf, born near the German town of
Freiberg in 1522 – a calf with an unusual extra skin-fold around the back of
the neck that reminded people of a monk’s cowl. This calf became famous
through the flourishing distribution of broadsheets, and especially because
Martin Luther, with Philipp Melanchthon, wrote a pamphlet in which he
interpreted it as a sign showing the degeneracy of the religious orders
(whose clothes, like the calf’s “hood”, gave the impression of piety, but
whose true nature was not spiritual).
Spinks tells a somewhat less ambitious story than Wiesner-Hanks, but does a
lot more legwork. She traces the development of the representations of
monstrous births in sixteenth-century Germany, where the news of unusually
formed children and animals was keenly spread in broadsheets, woodcuts and
other printed depictions. Although much of her work consists of careful
interpretations of individual texts and images, several trends emerge in the
ways in which these people and animals were understood. Most clearly,
Spinks’s findings challenge a traditional narrative in which the religious
world-view of the Middle Ages is gradually replaced in the Renaissance and
early modern periods by a more scientific outlook. Instead, developing
arguments of Robert Scribner, Park and Daston, Spinks argues that the
broadsheets even bear witness to an increase in religious interest in
“monsters” during the Reformation period. Like Luther, both Protestant and
Catholic theologians saw strangely shaped creatures as signs of the divine,
and used them to argue their opposite cases. The monk calf, for instance,
was used not only by the Protestants but also by Johann Nas’s Catholic
counter-propaganda as an image for Luther’s own corruption: “Lucifer an ox.
Superbia [pride] a cow. Luther their calf”. Like Wiesner-Hanks, Spinks
observes that “monsters”, especially the human infants, at the beginning of
the century were valued and treated with respect rather than disgust.
However, she detects an increasingly apocalyptic trend, interpreting them as
portents of the coming of the end of the world, a trend which was
exacerbated by worries about a Turkish invasion. As in the Gonzales case, a
mistrust of women and their susceptibility to malign influences that affect
their unborn children is a subtext of many of these publications.
Interest also shifted from the exotic monstrous races that were believed to
inhabit the outer edges of the known world to unusually shaped individuals
and animals born in Germany and Europe itself. Always paying close attention
to the media which transmitted news of these births, Spinks discusses images
by famous artists such as Albrecht Dürer and Hans Burgmaier the Elder, which
she finds not as interesting as some of the less polished and realistic
renderings. The juxtaposition of image and text in most of her sources
allows the monsters to be interpreted piecemeal, where each unusual body
part or even pose is ascribed a particular meaning, so that the image in
turn becomes readable as a kind of composite narrative in itself. The
interest in individual cases did not last long, though: by the 1550s,
multitudes of unusual humans and animals were grouped together in
collections and books of wonders similar to those into which the Gonzales
found their way.
Lavishly illustrated, beautifully produced and written, Spinks’s
investigation, like Merry Wiesner-Hanks’s, proves how fruitful attention to
the unusual can be in understanding the typical, mainstream mentalities,
beliefs and culture of early modern society. Show me your monsters, and I
will show you who you are.
Merry Wiesner-Hanks
THE MARVELOUS HAIRY GIRLS
The Gonzales sisters and their worlds
248pp. Yale University Press. £18.99.
978 0 300 12733 1
Jennifer Spinks
MONSTROUS BIRTHS AND VISUAL CULTURE IN SIXTEENTH-CENTURY GERMANY
224pp. Pickering & Chatto. £60.
978 1 85196 630 1
Bettina Bildhauer is a lecturer in German at the University of St
Andrews. She is co-editor (with Robert Mills) of The Monstrous Middle Ages,
published in 2003, and author of Medieval Blood, 2006.
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