An Introduction to the Renaissance Monster Studies: Hybrid Beings and Other Creatures

Karabykov, Anton

doi:10.31857/S004287440000915-1

English

Home>Issue 8>An Introduction to the Renaissance Monster Studies: Hybrid Beings and Other Creatures

An Introduction to the Renaissance Monster Studies: Hybrid Beings and Other Creatures

Table of contents

Annotation Estimate Publication content

References Comments

An Introduction to the Renaissance Monster Studies: Hybrid Beings and Other Creatures

Annotation

PII

S004287440001339-7-1

Publication type

Article

Status

Published

Authors

Anton Karabykov Send message

Affiliation: V.I. Vernadsky Crimean Federal University
Address: Russian Federation

Edition

Issue 8

Pages

52-64

Abstract

The views on essence and causes of hybrid, human-animal, monsters’ birth prevailing in academic circles of the West in the 16^th – first half of 17^th Cс. are explored on a vast material of primary works in medicine, natural philosophy and natural history. Understanding the monstrous as the other in relation to the human the author considers these spheres as interconnected cultural constructs. Thus an analysis of the Renaissance conceptions in the field of Monster Studies sheds light on shady sides of the contemporaneous anthropology. It gets clear, in particular, that a) there was a realm of constant species of hybrid beings stretching between the human and the animal domains; b) essential causes of hybrid individuals’ birth were based on acceptance of such possibilities as conception via copulating with animals and production of physical effects on a fetus by power of mother’s imagination; c) evidence of natural and significance of divine causes of individual monsters’ appearance usually were thought to be inversely proportional while these causes themselves – as mutually complementary. Eliminating of those and related notions completed in the Enlightenment caused decline of Renaissance “monstrology” as well as a revision of fundamental presumptions on which the prior anthropology had rested.

Keywords

Renaissance culture, natural history, history of medicine, historical anthropology, geographical discoveries, monsters, portents, imagination, bestiality, spontaneous generation.

Date of publication

03.10.2018

Number of purchasers

Views

856

Readers community rating

0.0 (0 votes)

Cite Download pdf

GOST	Karabykov A. An Introduction to the Renaissance Monster Studies: Hybrid Beings and Other Creatures // Voprosy filosofii. – 2018. – Issue 8 C. 52-64 . URL: https://vphil.jes.su/s004287440001339-7-1/. DOI: 10.31857/S004287440000915-1
MLA	Karabykov, Anton "An Introduction to the Renaissance Monster Studies: Hybrid Beings and Other Creatures." Voprosy filosofii. 8 (2018).:52-64. DOI: 10.31857/S004287440000915-1
APA	Karabykov A. (2018). An Introduction to the Renaissance Monster Studies: Hybrid Beings and Other Creatures. Voprosy filosofii. no. 8, pp.52-64 DOI: 10.31857/S004287440000915-1

Additional services access

Additional services for the article

Services benefits

100 RUB / 1.0 SU


	Publication text not found

References

1. Bates, Alan W. (2005) Emblematic Monsters: Unnatural Conceptions and Deformed Births in Early Modern Europe, Rodopi, Amsterdam.

2. Brah, Jean-Pierre, Hanegraaff, Wouter J. (2006) ‘Correspondences’, Hanegraaff, Wouter J. (ed.) Dictionary of Gnosis & Western Esotericism, Brill, Leiden, Boston, pp. 275–279.

3. Campbell, Mary B. (1988) The Witness and the Other World: Exotic European Travel Writing, 400–1600, Cornell University Press, Ithaca & London.

4. Cohen, Jeffrey J. (1996) ‘Monster Culture (Seven Theses)’, Cohen, Jeffrey J. (ed.) Monster theory: reading culture, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, London, pp. 3–25.

5. Correia, Clara Pinto (1997) The Ovary of Eve: Egg and Sperm and Preformation, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, London.

6. Daston, Lorraine, Park, Katharine (1998) Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150–1750, Zone books, New York.

7. Davies, Surekha (2016) Renaissance Ethnography and the Invention of the Human: New Worlds, Maps and Monsters, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

8. Eamon, William (1994) Science and the Secrets of Nature: Books of Secrets in Medieval and Early Modem Culture, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ

9. Finucci, Valeria (2001) ‘Maternal imagination and Monstrous Birth: Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata’, Finucci, Valeria and Brownlee, Kevin (eds.) Generation and Degeneration: Tropes of Reproduction in Literature and History from Antiquity through Early Modern Europe, Duke University Press, Durham, London, pp. 41–79. Fudge, Erica (2000) Perceiving animals: humans and beasts in early modem English culture, St. Martin Press, New York.

10. Jorink, Eric (2010) Reading the Book of Nature in the Dutch Golden Age, 1575–1715, tr. Peter Mason, Brill, Leiden, Boston.

11. Huet, Mari-Hélène (1993) Monstrous Imagination, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, London.

12. McLean, Matthew (2007) The Cosmographia of Sebastian Münster: describing the world in the Reformation, Ashgate, Aldershot, Burlington.

13. Van Duzer, Chet (2012) ‘Hic sunt dracones: The Geography and Cartography of Monsters’, Mittman, Asa Simon and Dendle, Peter (eds.) The Ashgate Research Companion to Monsters and the Monstrous, Ashgate, Aldershot, Burlington, pp. 387–436.

14. Walton, Michael T., Fineman, Robert M., Walton Phyllis J. (1993) ‘Of Monsters and Prodigies: The Interpretation of Birth Defects in the Sixteenth Century’, American Journal of Medical Genetics, 47, pp. 7–13