“Since classical antiquity, monsters had been seen as religious signs and were closely associated with miracles in early Christian literature”[4]. Monstrous birth led to the belief that the communities at the time women) were practicing biblical sins (adultery, greed, and vanity), which were associated with the devil. The deformed children have seen a sign of impending doom, whether in form of a plague or a flood.[5] Religious societies would then use these “children” to promote certain political or religious agenda. Ambroise Paré's treatise on monsters and prodigious births shows conjoined twins [fig. 1]. The image is of a twin girls who were born with their waist connected. Since the family of the twins was poor, they traveled across Italy, so people could marvel at the children. It was believed by many during that time, that having this conjoined twin around “could spoil the fruit of the pregnant women by the apprehension and ideas which might remain in their imaginative faculty”[6] and hence they were eventually driven out. By simply having people with deformities around, people believed that it could cause a chain reaction, that would produce more monstrosities. As the monstrous birth increased, Protestants and Catholics started to use these births for propaganda, to promote certain political and religious agenda. Individuals in power and influence started to promote the idea that monstrous birth was due to the secret desires of a woman and the devil and that the child was the spawn of the devil [7]. “Now these demons can in many manners and fashions deceive our earthbound heaviness, by reason of the subtlety of their essence and malice of their will.”[8] If the child did not look like its father, divine intervention has taken place and hence the child had shown the mothers sin [9] The deformed people became poster children of impending doom and hence were shown naked in their interpretation to dehumanize them and show the sins committed during their conceiving and hence have been punished by God.
4. Surekha Davies, “The Unlucky, the Bad and the Ugly: Categories of Monstrosity from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment,” in The Ashgate Research Companion to Monsters and the Monstrous, ed. Asa Simon Mittman (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2013), 52
5. Davies, “The Unlucky, the Bad and the Ugly: Categories of Monstrosity from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment,” 52.
6. Ambroise Paré, On Monsters and Marvels, trans. Janis L. Pallister (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 9-33
7. Davies, “The Unlucky, the Bad and the Ugly: Categories of Monstrosity from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment,” 54.
8. Ambroise Paré, On Monsters and Marvels, trans. Janis L. Pallister (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 91.
9. Davies, “The Unlucky, the Bad and the Ugly: Categories of Monstrosity from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment,” 50.
