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Anita Guerrini (University of California, Santa Barbara)
Abstract
This essay challenges the generalization that monsters were “naturalized” in the eighteenth century because attention shifted from supernatural to natural causes. Anatomical accounts of monsters in the first half of the eighteenth century in fact paid little or no attention to causes. Within the teleological schemes of the anatomists, monsters, like animals, displayed nature’s ingenuity. Examination of monstrous humans could help to define normal humanity while also demonstrating the extremes of nature’s possibilities, and the language of wonder, if not attribution to the supernatural, continued to be employed. Nature may have been subject to laws but the laws were yet beyond human understanding. A close study of two accounts of monsters from 1700 and 1748 demonstrates the peculiarly anatomical point of view in contrast to attention to causes. They also point up the distinction between the display of monsters and their description in print, and the intersection of learned and popular culture in the study of anomalous human forms.
Bio
Anita Guerrini
is a Professor in the Departments of History and Environmental Studies
at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her books
include
Natural History and the New World (American Philosophical Society, 1986) and Experimenting
with Humans and Animals: From Galen to Animal Rights
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 2003), and she is the author of many essays
on anatomy, natural history and physiology in the eighteenth century.
<personal webpage>
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