PIERRE BOAISTUAU - eTheses Repository - University of Birmingham

society, where human society was equated with normality’. 930 It may have belonged
to Western Christian thought due to the work of writers such as St. Augustine and
Isidore of Seville who linked the ‘marvellous’ and ‘wonderful’ to Scripture as part of
God’s plan, but remained on the periphery. In Boaistuau’s time the once distant
mysterious creatures came closer to human societies. They acquired definite form and
more detailed information than before. Compilations such as Histoires prodigieuses
contained the specific time, location and appearance of monsters, and even a reference
if the writer had not been an eye-witness. For example, it was by this means that
Boaistuau introduced the story of two girls joined at the forehead: ‘leurs fronts
s’entretenoient, ensemble sans que par aucun artifice humain on les peust separer, ilz
se regardoient intentiuement l’vne l’autre, moy Munstere les ay veuz à Mayence, l’an
1501’. 931 Another difference was the attempt by sixteenth-century authors to
distinguish between genuine and counterfeit monsters: ‘Ie sçay qu’il y a encore vne
espece de Monstres artificielz, laquelle est fort familiere à ces prestygiateurs qui vont
par les prouinces abuser le peuple pour en tirer argent’. 932
In terms of context, the term ‘monstrous’ was commonly used as a synonym for the
word ‘prodigious’ in contemporary literary works. This is also confirmed by
Boaistuau, who employed the two terms interchangeably. For instance, he noted
regarding the emergence of volcanoes: ‘Il n’est point estrange que le feu tombant du
930 Wilson, D., Signs and Portents: Monstrous Births from the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment
(London, 1993), p. 4. For an anthropological approach to monster see Hodgen, M., Early Anthropology
in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Philadelphia, 1964), especially chapters 4, 5 and 6;
Campbell, M. B., Wonder and Science: Imagining Worlds in Early Modern Europe (Ithaca, 1999),
especially pp. 221-256.
931 Boaistuau, P., Histoires prodigieuses, p. 17r.
932 Ibid, p. 15v. For further detail see Semonin, P., ‘Monsters in the Marketplace: The Exhibition of
Human Anomalies in Early Modern England’, in Thomson, R. G. (ed.), Freakery: Cultural Spectacles
of the Extraordinary Body (New York, 1996), pp. 69-81; Hoffmann, K. A., ‘Sutured bodies: counterfeit
marvels in Early Modern Europe’, Seventeenth-Century French Studies, vol. 24 (2002), pp. 57-70. Also
see the reference to counterfeit serpents in Histoires prodigieuses, Chapitre 32.
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