Critical Introduction

John Spencer (1630–1693) was an antiquarian at Cambridge and conceived of this book as a challenge to the prevailing belief in place since antiquity that prodigies—monstrous births human and animal—were signs from God. Instead, he argued that they were simply natural phenomena resulting from errors in the processes of conception and gestation. While this might seem like a radical break from tradition, Spencer's motives were quite orthodox: he was attempting to stop ordinary people from making their own interpretations of monstrous phenomena, which he argued were either in no way signs of God's will or, if they were, that they could only be interpreted by the Church. Signs should not be read, according to Spencer, as indications that the Church or Crown should be challenged. His explicitly stated goal, therefore, was to preserve “the quiet and tranquillity of the State” by explaining away a remarkable and diverse array of monsters through a process in which he attempts to “indict them at the bar of Reason.” It is unsurprising, then, that unlike the authors of broadsheets and other widely disseminated, inexpensive monster accounts, Spencer's hefty and costly volume, laiden with quotations in Greek and Latin, was aimed at the wealthy, learned establishment, which had no interest in seeing their own power and authority diminished by those who would read monsters as signs encouraging popular revolt and revolution. Spencer was a Protestant and held to a common belief that miracles had ceased to occur centuries before his own era.

Reading Questions

What sorts of explanations does Spencer offer for prodigies? What do his judgments imply about those who are interested in monsters and other strange phenomena?

Editorial Notes

Few changes to Spencer's text have been made; most spelling has been silently modernized, though Spencer's seventeenth-century style of capitalization and italicization has been maintained. The text reproduced here is from the 1665 second edition.

Further Reading

Burns, William E. An Age of Wonders: Prodigies, Politics, and Providence in England, 1657–1727. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002.