Beautiful Monsters
By Emma Marigliano with James Moss
This article introduces some of the books from The Portico Library’s 2018 exhibition, Beautiful Monsters, with Anya Charikov-Mickleburgh, Laura Dekker, Donal Moloney, Ed Saye, Evgenyi Strelkov and Dina Varpahovsky.
Historiae animalium by Conrad Gessner, 1560.
Historiae animalium: nomenclator & icones animalium aquatilium. Conrad Gessner, 1560.
The fantastical creatures illustrated in the 16th-century encyclopedia Historiae Animalium have influenced countless writers and scholars through the centuries. The book’s author, Conrad Gessner, included actual and mythological animals side-by-side, including many labelled ‘monsters’, with little distinction between the real and the imaginary.
Conrad Gessner’s schooling in theology and classical languages formed the basis of his Historiae Animalium. Derived from his extensive library of Greek and Latin authors as well as German, French and Italian sources, the encyclopaedia was his masterwork, with some of the illustrations apparently drawn from life. His woodcut of ‘The Great Orm’, a Scandinavian sea monster (and nothing to do with the Welsh headland of the same name), was possibly copied from the Carta Marina by Olaus Magnus.
The Great Orm, Historiae animalium: nomenclator & icones animalium aquatilium. Conrad Gessner, 1560.
Carta Marina. Olaus Magnus, 1539
Gessner’s chronicle of beasts of the land, air and water became enormously popular and the ‘go-to’ zoological reference work of the Renaissance period. Anna Pavord, herself a celebrated natural history writer, described him as a ‘one man search engine, a 16th-century Google’. He died of Bubonic Plague at the age of 49, likely contracted while trying to discover a way to contain its outbreak in his hometown of Zurich.
Gypsy sorcery and fortune telling by Charles Godfrey Leland, 1891.
Top: Gypsy sorcery and fortune telling: illustrated by numerous incantations, specimens of medical magic, anecdotes and tales. Charles Godfrey Leland, 1891.
Right: Charles Godfrey Leland c. 1853.
Charles Godfrey Leland was a Philadelphian who became influential on the development of witchcraft, wicca and neopagansim generally. Gypsy Sorcery was copiously illustrated and impressively indexed, covering the subject from a global perspective. Voodoo (which Leland calls ‘mischievous and vindictive magic’) is followed by Hungarian, Italian, Slavonian and Transylvanian sorcery, with incantations, cures and ‘the magic which is innate in all men and women’ all laid bare.
Leland is an entertaining alliterative writer, describing the ‘religion of the drum and the demon’ as ‘a disease’, and ‘devil doctoring’. While some monsters appear within the text, such as Saint Theodore (‘more of a goblin than a holy man’), most live within the beautiful chapter head and tail piece illustrations, possibly influenced by the style of William Morris.
A treatise on adulteration of food, and culinary poisons by Frederick Accum, 1820.
Chemical Lectures, coloured engraving by Thomas Rowlandson, c. 1810. The inscription Surrey Institution on the door frame and the title Accum’s Lectures on the dust jacket of a book held by the man sitting bottom left indicate that this image likely depicts Accum.
Frederick Accum’s book is not simply a ‘treatise’ on those foodstuffs that are poisonous, but one which examines what is added to food and drink to increase its volume or alter its taste. It appears that, like the horsemeat scandal of 2013 and, more recently, the fear of American bleached chicken reaching UK supermarkets, unscrupulous dealers of the time added substances for gain and profit. The author draws a comparison with the addition of these substances to the curious biblical story of Elisha and his meeting with the prophets: Elisha told his servant to put on a large pot of stew for his guests. The servant gathered herbs and found a wild vine, picking from it all the gourds he could carry and adding them to the stew. Many gourds are inedible, so when Elisha saw his servant adding them to the stew he exclaimed just in time “There is death in the pot!”, thus avoiding a ‘mass poisoning of prophets’! Perhaps this is what Accum intended with his treatise – the prevention of people being poisoned through foodstuffs and drinks.
Legends and superstitions of the sea and of sailors in all lands and at all times by Fletcher S. Bassett, 1885.
Legends and superstitions of the sea and of sailors in all lands and at all times. Fletcher S. Bassett, 1885.
‘Feejee Mermaid’, shown in P.T. Barnum's American Museum, 1842, as leased from Moses Kimball of the Boston Museum, papier-mache - Peabody Museum, Harvard University.
Legends and superstitions of the sea and of sailors in all lands and at all times. Fletcher S. Bassett, 1885.
The first thing that confronts the reader of this volume is the frontispiece – monstrous to be sure. The image is dark shaded, with a boat sailing in the ‘Sea of Darkness’ towards a rising moon. Between the boat and the moon, a gigantic hand emerges out of the sea, either waving to or halting the hapless sailors. This, the caption says, is the Hand of Satan!
Fletcher Steward Bassett was an American naval officer who developed a special interest in folklore. From ancient legends to poets and ballad writers, he consulted many sources, and includes in this book illustrations of Gessner’s ‘Monk-fish’ and ‘Bishop-fish’, and the ‘Feejee Mermaid’ exhibited by P. T. Barnum in 1822 (later proven to be a hoax consisting of a fish tail joined to a monkey’s body).
Travels in South America from the Pacific to the Atlantic Ocean by Paul Marcoy, 1875.
Interior of the The Temple of the Sun During the Later Reign of the Incas from Travels in South America from the Pacific to the Atlantic Ocean. Paul Marcoy, 1875. Illustration by Eduard Riou.
Travels in South America from the Pacific to the Atlantic Ocean. Paul Marcoy, 1875.
Paul Marcoy was a French nobleman whose Travels in South America presented a social, cultural and ethnographic account of the peoples he encountered on his travels. Considered able to relate to all the different communities he dealt with, he was nevertheless condescending when describing them.
Do the monsters in this volume come in the form of the hooded mummies with egg-shaped heads arranged in circles in the tombs of the Aymara? Or perhaps they are the European Conquistadors of whom Marcoy is so critical, and who destroyed so much of the continent they invaded – physically, psychologically and spiritually.
The evolution of man: a popular exposition of the principle points of human ontogeny and phylogeny by Ernst Haeckel & E. Ray Lankester, 1879.
The evolution of man: a popular exposition of the principle points of human ontogeny and phylogeny. Ernst Haeckel & E. Ray Lankester, 1879.
Plate 67 from Kunstformen der natur, (art forms of nature). Ernst Haeckel, 1904.
In his preface, Ernst Haeckel admits that ‘anthropogeny’ (the study of the origin of humankind) is difficult to present and full of risks, with ‘priestly influence’ and ‘disgust’ just two of the obstacles faced by those who would argue an evolution different to that taught in the Bible. He hurls invective at the Church, accusing the ‘infallible Vatican’ of preventing the progress of science, with extracts from Goethe’s Prometheus and Faust introducing the audaciousness of author and publisher in taking on the might of Heaven.
Gulliver’s travels by Jonathan Swift, 1776.
The adventures of Captain Gulliver, in a voyage to the islands of Lilliput and Brobdignag. Abridged from the works of Dean Swift. Adorned with cuts. Jonathan Swift, 1776.
Swift’s popular satire on politics, literature and society, Gulliver’s Travels, was partly a response to the new fashion for travel writing that accompanied the expansionism of the colonial era. In far-off lands with strange names – Brobdingnag, Lilliput, Balnibarbi (and Japan!) – its title character finds himself at the mercy of squabbling leaders and superstitious tribes, all with thinly disguised similarities to the societies of Britain and Ireland in which the author lived. At different points in the story he is both gigantic and miniature in relation to his captors, giving us as readers an opportunity to consider and sympathise with the monstrous in us all.
The life of Gargantua and of Pantagruel by François Rabelais, 1532-34.
Songes drolatiques de Pantagruel. François Rabelais, 1565.
The first two volumes of Gargantua & Pantagruel were published under the pseudonym Alcofribas Nasier (an anagram of the author’s name) and are collected here in The Portico Library’s Works of Francis Rabelais. This fictional history of father-and-son giants is a bawdy, scatological romp that mocked the 16th-century French Church and aristocracy with wild vulgar humour and sometimes horrible violence.
Its use of imaginative, often invented language has inspired many illustrators and authors (including Swift), and even introduced a new word to our vocabulary – ‘gargantuan’ for monstrously enormous. A former monk and physician, Rabelais was a humanist who was unflinching in his criticism of the gluttony and indulgence of the Renaissance nobility.
Emma Marigliano is former Librarian of The Portico Library
James Moss is Exhibitions curator at The Portico Library