1st Edition
Monsters and Borders in the Early Modern Imagination
This edited collection explores the axis where monstrosity and borderlands meet to reflect the tensions, apprehensions, and excitement over the radical changes of the early modern era. The book investigates the monstrous as it acts in liminal spaces in the Renaissance and the era of Enlightenment. Zones of interaction include chronological change – from the early New World encounters through the seventeenth century – and cultural and scientific changes, in the margins between national boundaries, and also cultural and intellectual boundaries.
Introduction Hans Peter Broedel and Jana Byars 1. Creating Monstrosity in Colonial Spanish America Robert C. Schwaller 2. The Mermaid of Edam Meets Medical Science: Empiricism and the Marvelous in Seventeenth-Century Zoological Thought Hans Peter Broedel 3. Bleeding Bodies and Bondage: Signifiers of Illegitimacy in Ghirlandaio’s Adoration of the Magi and Andrea della Robbia’s Tondi at the Ospedale degli Innocenti, Florence Elizabeth A. Lisot-Nelson 4. "In questa guerra tutti ne è stà turchi": The Turk as Ultimate Enemy in Sixteenth-Century Italy Linda L. Carroll 5. Alpine Cannibals: French Renaissance Representations of the Alps and Their Residents Richard Keatley 6. Imagining the Amazon: Monstrous Discourses about Gynocracy in Elizabethan England Jessica Oxendine 7. Columbus’s Monsters: One-Eyed Men, Dog-Headed Men, Cannibals, and Amazons in the Accounts of the First Two Columbian Voyages Elena Daniele 8. Monsters and Men in the Wild New World: A Study of the Monstrous in Girolamo Benzoni’s Historia del Mondo Nuovo Jana Byars 9. "A True Narrative of the Grievous Affliction of Roger Sterrop in Somer Islands": Demonic Possession and the Puritan Project in Early Seventeenth-Century Bermuda Judith Bonzol 10. Montaigne’s Mercurial Masculinity Kathleen Long 11. Bigfoot Meets the Wild Man: Monstrous Borders Between Contemporary American and Early Modern European Culture Amanda Boyd
Biography
Jana Byars is an independent scholar based in Amsterdam.
Hans Peter Broedel is an Associate Professor at the University of North Dakota.
