This essay considers the constructive intellectual system revealed by the methodical examination of monsters’ visible anomalies during the early modern period. The images and texts that resulted from the study of monsters provided a model of anatomical knowledge that became a valid alternative to the normal ideals promoted by anatomists like Andreas Vesalius, who upheld the idea that truth lied in practice-based processes and their textual and visible translations. The ways in which monstrous bodies were explored echoed these practices and thus reinforced the epistemological maquette proposed by early modern dissections of normalized human bodies.

The question of ‘monsters’ engaged several fields of knowledge in the sixteenth century: medical traditions from ancient and medieval to early modern sources; theological disputes from antiquity to the Middle Ages; mythological writings from ancient authors and their fantastic adaptations in the Middle Ages; and finally, popular culture informed by selected samples of medical, theological and mythological themes. As medical inquiries grew stronger during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries – fuelled by first-hand anatomical observations – the second, third and fourth components that defined the monstrous grew weaker in published works. The causes of monstrousness were not understood solely as the results of the opposition between devilish and divine forces, or only as the product of sympathetic magic during pregnancy. Increasingly, methodical explanations were used to shed light on the origins of physical deviance.