Humans and monsters

“This is a book about monster-making: the stories societies tell about who they think isn’t normal or typical—the process of defining people as something outside normal categories, as something monstrous,” writes Surekha Davies in the Introduction to Humans: A Monstrous History.

An award-winning historian and recipient of two Folger fellowships, Davies explores humankind’s long history with monsters—how we have created, classified, and identified them throughout the ages—and explains how monsters are, at their core, marked by the idea of otherness. Who and what we see as a threat becomes subhuman; when we distinguish “self” from “the rest” we create a monster lurking somewhere outside of societal norms. And when we relate our fellow humans to everything from apes to witches to zombies, we place them outside the realm of the normal—a fundamental process in inventing stereotypes.

Blending science, history, and pop culture, Davies shows how our multi-millennial relationship with monsters has shaped the origins of the modern world. In this excerpt, Davies travels back to the 16th Century to tell the story of the Gonsalvus family.  

She peers out expectantly, a folded sheet in her hands, almost as if she is waiting to show us her homework. The vibrant pattern on her dress makes it look like a party frock: a celebration of orange-and-crimson stripes, swirls, tendrils, and tulips that echo the blooms in her hair. Slashed sleeves show off a rich green fabric underneath her dress, picking up the leaves that garland her head. Antoinette Gonsalvus, or Antonietta Gonzales, born in Paris in the 1580s, was perhaps eight years old when this watercolor was copied from a recent painting, below. Someone, not knowing how old Antoinette was, penned the caption, “A twenty-year-old woman with a furry head resembling that of an ape and a smooth, hairless body.”

Antoinette’s portrait appears in the massive repository of drawings, watercolors, books, manuscripts, artifacts, and objects of nature amassed by the sixteenth-century Bolognese physician, collector, and naturalist Ulisse Aldrovandi, a man who rivaled the ancient Greek naturalist Pliny the Elder in the vastness of his interests. Aldrovandi and his assistants assembled a gigantic, encyclopedic collection, sifting acquisitions with an eye to his manifold interests, from archaeology to medicine. As I leafed through the digitized volumes of drawings now housed in the University Library in Bologna, Italy, it was difficult not to do a double-take at this portrait of little Antoinette, for her face looks decidedly furry. And this picture is in a volume largely devoted to…animals.

How would this girl in a dress have felt to find herself here: would there be surprise—or knowing? Little Antoinette is unlikely to have found animal comparisons flattering. Her condition, now termed hypertrichosis universalis, is extremely rare: only about fifty cases are known through surviving documentation. Antoinette was the daughter of the also-hairy Petrus Gonsalvus, or Pedro Gonzales, an Indigenous person from the eastern Atlantic Ocean archipelago now called the Canary Islands. In 1547, when Petrus was a boy, his life had been turned upside-down. He was captured by Spanish invaders of his island and taken to the French royal court. There he was schooled in Latin—the language of the educated—and he became a courtier. He married a Frenchwoman named Catherine. The couple had six children (three daughters and three sons) who survived infancy. All the children apart from one son seem to have been unusually hairy.

Petrus Gonsalvus’s kidnapping and subsequent life took place against a backdrop of flotillas of ships from Europe, crossing oceans to deposit explorers, colonists, merchants, clerics, physicians, and naturalists on distant shores. From these invaders and their writings and imagery, people in Europe learned of an immense number of species that were new to them. These creatures baffled and amazed newcomers and collectors back home. Where did an armadillo go on the map of life, or a bird of paradise, said to lack legs and to spend its life in the air, even while sleeping?

To an observer in Europe, Petrus might have appeared to straddle the boundary between human and animal. To an observer like the naturalist Aldrovandi, perhaps Petrus was an extraordinary exception that proved the rule that humans are humans and animals are not. But if Petrus was not entirely human, then human and animal were not entirely separate categories. He had hairy children—like little Antoinette—with a typical human woman. What did that say about the boundary between hairy folk and humans? If Petrus and his children were not entirely human, then human and animal were overlapping categories. Perhaps it was safer to recognize them all as entirely human, just unusually hairy.

Aldrovandi was clearly fascinated by parallels between humans and other animals. Questions about Antoinette Gonsalvus’s relationship to humanity may have passed through his mind and through the minds of his assistants as they stuck images of people with unusual physical characteristics into volumes of animal pictures. A volume devoted primarily to birds sports diagrams of two skeletons, one human, the other avian, on the first page. A common alphabetical sequence identifies their bones. Toward the end of the volume, Team Aldrovandi inserted drawings of a number of unusual people; more are scattered across the other animal volumes.

In placing a few unusual individuals in a collection devoted to animals, Aldrovandi’s workshop was not unique. The Gonsalvus family inspired numerous artists, physicians, and naturalists to think about them alongside animals. Some recorded their encounters with the hairy family in drawings, watercolors, and paintings. A watercolor album by the Flemish artist Joris Hoefnagel uses depictions of the Gonsalvus family to take viewers on an even more surprising journey from human to animal. Hoefnagel, originally from the turreted city of Antwerp (in present-day Belgium), settled in Munich (now in Germany) at the court of the Bavarian duke Albrecht V around 1577. There he assembled four albums of his watercolors of living beings under the themes of air, water, earth, and fire. In sixteenth-century Europe, these four elements were thought to be the building-blocks of matter. The Gonsalvus family he grouped under “fire,” along with insects, in a volume titled Fire: Rational Animals and Insects.

The volume opens with a portrait of Petrus and Catherine, above. Next comes a portrait of two of their hirsute children, dressed in matching pink. The following two pages are almost blank, but tantalizing captions announce that Hoefnagel planned to add a “pygmy” and a “giant.” By combining images of atypical individuals with insects, Hoefnagel made the Gonsalvus children, pygmies, and giants strange, implicitly less human than typical humans, to anyone thumbing through the album. At the very least, they were classificatory problems: monsters that cracked open and blended categories usually understood as separate.

Like Aldrovandi and Hoefnagel, today’s scientists sometimes wrestle with how to classify life-forms previously unknown to them. In 2003, on the island of Flores, Indonesia, scientists excavated fossilized bones from people averaging just 1.06 meters (3.5 feet) in height. Homo floresiensis, as this species would soon be called (although the nickname of “hobbit” was perhaps unavoidable), had become extinct only seventeen thousand years ago. Their presence on earth had overlapped with that of modern humans, Homo sapiens. So were the Flores fossils those of a late-surviving near relative of people living today, the remains of another species of great ape, or merely the bones of a few, diseased individuals?

Such debates are common in paleoanthropology. Scientists puzzled over the same issues with Homo neandertalensis, or Neanderthals. These conundrums share a fossil discovery that challenged understandings of human evolution. In each case scientists picked their way through three possible explanations. The first was that the fossils came from diseased but human individuals. The second was that they came from a previously unknown animal species. And the third was that these fossils revealed that paleoanthropologists needed to sit down and rewrite the story of human evolution. Within a few years, the growing consensus that Homo floresiensis was a hominin (a near relative of today’s humans) led scientists to revise the genealogy of Homo sapiens—people today. While scientists know what a human is in geographic space, they are far less sure what a human is across geological time.

About the author

Dr. Surekha Davies is a British author, speaker, and historian of science, art, and ideas. Her first book, Renaissance Ethnography and the Invention of the Human, won the Morris D. Forkosch Prize for the best first book in intellectual history from the Journal of the History of Ideas and the Roland H. Bainton Prize in History and Theology. She has published essays and book reviews about the histories of biology, anthropology, and monsters in the Times Literary Supplement, Nature, Science, and Aeon.