Surekha Davies on the Making of Monsters

What do monsters tell us about how people understand the world—and each other? In early modern Europe, the monstrous wasn’t just the stuff of fairy tales. It was a way to categorize, explain, and justify human differences.

Historian Surekha Davies joins us to explore how ideas of wonder, race, and the monstrous shaped European thought in the age of empire. These weren’t just abstract concepts—they were embedded in scientific discourse, travel writing, and the visual culture of the time.

Shakespeare’s plays reflect these cultural currents. In The Tempest, the character of Caliban—described as savage, deformed, and barely human—embodies the fears and fantasies that haunted early modern encounters with the so-called “New World.” Davies unpacks how Caliban’s portrayal draws on the same ways of thinking that labeled certain people monstrous and how Shakespeare’s work offers a lens into the period’s views on race, colonialism, and imagination.

As we confront new technologies like artificial intelligence, Davies helps us consider what today’s “monstrous others” might be and how early modern ways of thinking linger in our discussions of what it means to be human.

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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.

From the Shakespeare Unlimited podcast. Published April 8, 2025. © Folger Shakespeare Library. All rights reserved. This episode was produced by Matt Frassica. Garland Scott is the executive producer. It was edited by Gail Kern Paster. We had help with web production from Paola García Acuña. Leonor Fernandez edits our transcripts. Final mixing services are provided by Clean Cuts at Three Seas, Inc.

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FARAH KARIM-COOPER: From the Folger Shakespeare Library, this is Shakespeare Unlimited. I’m Farah Karim-Cooper, the Folger director.

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KARIM-COOPER: Our world is full of monsters. One glance at the news—or at Netflix—will tell you that.

But what do we mean when we say someone is a “monster”? That they’ve behaved in a way that crosses some uncrossable line? Or, is it possible that when we call someone a monster, we’re only ever really talking about ourselves?

The historian of science Surekha Davies has written a history of the world told through the lens of monsters. In her new book, Humans: A Monstrous History, monsters defy the categories humans construct to order society. For Davies, monsters are full of revolutionary potential.

Davies’ previous book was Renaissance Ethnography and the Invention of the Human: New Worlds, Maps and Monsters… perhaps you’re sensing a theme. Davies was a Folger Long-term Fellow from 2017–2018.

Here’s Surekha Davies, in conversation with Barbara Bogaev.

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BARBARA BOGAEV: You’ve written about monsters before, so what prompted you to write another book tackling all of human history?

SUREKHA DAVIES: Well, I didn’t initially imagine it was going to be a book about monsters. But I had taught an upper-level monsters course that my students loved, going from antiquity to about 1800, so I’d done a whole pile of homework on this subject already.

But in a way, there’s an ancient story to why I’m writing about monsters and it is that I spent my childhood just watching Star Trek and wanting to meet Martians, you know? And, you know, that sense of wonder when you realize that the world has beings that you could not have imagined.

Trying to capture that space is one reason I became a historian of exploration and wrote that first book about how exploring the Americas and traveling far changed how people in Europe thought about the category of the human.

But there was actually a Washington, DC, and, kind of, Folger Library impetus to some of this book—you know, the fact that it is so ambitious and speaks not only to people interested in history, but also people interested in science, in public policy and sci-fi and fantasy. While I was finishing that last book, I was in a fellowship at the Library of Congress, and then later at the Folger Library. At the Library of Congress, I stumbled into a conference on astrobiology. Astrobiology is the study of the possibility of life on other planets, in other galaxies, and of how we might deal with finding life like that. This conference was called “Preparing for Discovery” and in one of these panels, the scientists were giving papers about what to do about hostile aliens and all they could talk about was weapons. I thought they were really missing something. So, I put up my hand in a question-answer session and said, “Well, look, shouldn’t preparing for discovery include preparing societies for the shock of learning that there are extraterrestrials? You know, maybe people’s good religious beliefs will be shaken. People might panic. There might be looting. We might need to work together to deal with some extraordinary pathogen, when we might also need to have much better communication skills so that these moments of first contact don’t turn out to be complete disasters.” People were nodding in the audience but then the chair just cut me off and said, “That’s the wrong question.”

BOAGEV: Let’s get back to basics, what do you mean by a monster? What are we really talking about?

DAVIES: Well, I like to say that there are no monsters, but all of them are real. What I mean by that is “monster” is a word that within it holds stories. It’s a story about who or what counts as normal and where the boundary is between different kinds of beings.

So, any classificatory system that has discrete beings, like, let’s say, humans and wolves, if they’re separate then anything that transcends that boundary, like a werewolf, is by definition a monster, a category breaker. So, the simplest explanation for the word monster is simply category breaker. It’s a being that gets invented out of definitions of what things are.

In my book, Humans: A Monstrous History, I take the reader through three kinds of monsters that are defined when people define three kinds of boundaries. One of those boundaries is the boundary between types of things. So, where does human end and animal begin or god or machine? As you define gods and machines and animals and people, any beings that seem to kind of live right on the edge or straddle two categories—like the minotaur, half bull, half person—those would count as category breakers or monsters.

Then the second kind of boundary I deal with is the boundaries between social groups to whom a society might give different rights and privileges. So, where’s the boundary between men and women? Where’s the boundary between enslaved Africans and say free white people in the age of Atlantic slavery? That was a particular point at which something that existed on a continuum, which was from, you know, African to white person, because there were people of mixed heritage. In order to create a separation between white and Black, laws were written to say these were different kinds of beings with different rights and laws were invented to say that children who were half Black and half white were actually Black.

Finally, the third type of boundary I look at is how monsters are stories told to define the parameters of normal for a single human individual. So, what shape is, quote-unquote “normal” for a human in terms of the number of limbs or how tall or short they are? Words like “giant,” “freak,” “prodigy,” “dwarf”—they’re all words that show that people tell stories about what counts as normal for an individual human in terms of body or behavior. So, this whole range of types of so-called monster is that they’re all stories that define what normal means, what typical means and what a whole lot of categories mean.

BOAGEV: Yeah, and you sum up that, your definition, with a really interesting phrase: “Monsters are ideas that show us things.” You take your examination back to the Greeks and Romans who identify two broad categories of monsters that you’ve mentioned. One was monstrous births, and the other as distant peoples who they monstrified. Now I get to say Pliny the Elder—which is always my favorite thing to say.

DAVIES: Oh, hooray.

BOAGEV: Pliny the Elder apparently contributed a lot to the idea that ecology or extreme environments crafted monsters.

DAVIES: So, Pliny the Elder was this naturalist who lived 2000 years ago and he wrote this multi-volume treatise called, The Natural History, which was influential for about at least 1,500 years.

One of the ideas of ancient Greece and the near East about human bodies was that they were ultimately malleable. They contained four fundamental substances: the humors, and these humors were affected by the climate, by what you ate, and even to an extent, how you chose to live. This kind of theory among naturalists like Pliny was that in distant regions where the climate was very harsh, especially very cold or very hot, your humors would be deformed so much that you would become a monstrous person, or rather, there were in these distant places, entire communities who were quote, unquote “monstrous” and they were kind of monstrous nations, you know, monstrous species.

But the thing is, it’s all very well to say, “Monstrous peoples live in places where the climate is horrible.” But if you also understand human bodies to be malleable, then you know, theoretically if people travel far enough, they or their descendants would become monstrified. You know, where was the boundary between human space and monster space? There kind of wasn’t one.

BOAGEV: Very gray. That makes people anxious. Then you describe how Christians come along, and the primary identification and social hierarchy shifted to faith, to what you believe. If you didn’t convert, you were a barbarian and less than human.

DAVIES: Exactly. So, what “barbarian” meant in Western Christendom was slightly different from what it meant in ancient Greece. For the ancient Greeks, barbarians were people who couldn’t speak Greek. But for the Christians, barbarians—and really the uncivil—were people who weren’t of Christian faith and who refused to convert. One of the reasons this was so important was that Christianity had introduced this sense of the kind of human being, the ultimate type of living being, you know, separate from the rest of life on Earth, which existed more or less for humans to use. But the definition of a human was a being that was mortal and had the capacity to reason. If you are a mortal, who had the capacity to reason, your soul could go to heaven if you became Christian. But of course, you can’t see what someone’s soul is, and you can’t really see what someone’s faith is, and therein lies the anxiety about whether people of other faiths were capable of reason and what it meant if they were choosing not to convert.

BOAGEV: Right, or if they converted as an extension of this thinking, “Medieval European Christians,” you write, “believe that skin color or race changed was malleable. That faith turns you white.”

DAVIES: Yes, there are some, you know, kind of very, strange stories from the late Middle Ages about how, for example, some Muslims saw pieces of the true cross. They started off with deformed faces and bodies; once they saw the true cross and converted, they became white and their shapes became fully human.

There was a lot of anxiety around converted people, however. In the late 15th century and 16th century in Spain—you know, half of Spain had been Muslim for something like 700 years—and then in the late 15th century, the Catholic monarchs, Isabella and Ferdinand, drove Muslims out of southern Spain using military force. They forced Jews and Muslims to either convert to Christianity or to leave Spain. You know, a number of people converted. Others sort of converted, but kept up some of their earlier practices and this did not make the kind of traditional Catholics happy either. The traditional Christians came up with this label of “new Christians” to mean people whose ancestors had been Muslims or Jewish because Christian Spaniards feared that something in the blood had passed down through the generations, transmitting the moral failings of Jews and Muslims through to their children.

So, new Christians had different laws applied to them, different privileges. They were in the 16th century banned from traveling to the Americas because there was a fear that their dodgy beliefs would compromise Spanish missionary efforts. That challenge of managing faith was that it was ultimately invisible and some of the ways in which, you know, Christians—certainly in medieval England, in Spain—tried to deal with that, was by creating stereotypes about physical features. So, you could try and identify who was Jewish, for example, or forcing people to wear stars or live in certain areas or restricting what kinds of clothing they could wear to sort of pretend and try and create distinct categories of Christian over here and people who are not Christian over there, and not have a continuum.

BOAGEV: Right, and you feel all of this tension between surface appearance and essence that later crops up in so many of Shakespeare’s plays and writings. Now let’s get to Shakespeare because you write that well into Shakespeare’s time, these classical beliefs about monsters and how the extreme environments cause monstrous changes, they can all be seen in theories, as you said about the humors and also foreign cultures in the melting pot of London of Shakespeare’s day. The Reformation comes along in the 16th century, and it also sprouts fears you write about all sorts of monsters.

DAVIES: Well, Shakespeare lived, you know, a good 75 years, and if we look at the 150 years around his life from the early 16th century to the mid-17th century, you know, all kinds of things change for people in Europe that are all about monsters. So, to understand the era in which Shakespeare lived, and to understand how the things that happened in that era continue to shape the world we live in today means understanding the history of monsters and monster making. I’ll give you three or four examples quickly.

One is about what happened in the age of European exploration, ships sailing great distances, sailing to the equator, circumnavigating the earth, and the sewing together kind of human space and monster space and—

BOAGEV: Right, all sorts of fear about the races mixing and English becoming—they’re colonizers, but becoming changed by the colonies and the cultures there, marrying, intermarrying, all of that. We see that in Shakespeare, particularly in The Tempest, and you talk about in terms of Caliban in The Tempest, Shakespeare’s most famous so-called monster, born of a witch and a devil.

DAVIES: Yeah, just in The Tempest, just in the character of Caliban, there are so many—he’s like, he’s the monster version of the everything bagel, you know, he really is an everything monster.

So, first of all, who are his parents? You’ve got a witch. So, a witch was a person who gave their loyalty to the devil instead of to God and received powers, extra powers, in exchange. So, he was born of a witch and the devil, so that human demon line has been crossed. In terms of substance, Caliban is already a monster.

Then, he was supposedly born under the influence of the Moon. R,emember with humoral theory, not just climate, but actually even astrological phenomena could shape a body. He supposedly couldn’t speak properly until Miranda taught him how to speak.

Caliban’s very name is an anagram or a remix of cannibal, and this was a new word in European languages. Around the year 1500 and onwards, there was a people in the Caribbean islands called the Caribs or the Caniba, who supposedly consumed human flesh. As early as 1503, the Iberian kingdoms start to write laws to single out these so-called “canibales” and to justify war against them in order to save their future victims. So, that word “cannibal,” if you applied it to a tribe that effectively, you know, justified your taking away their lands.

So, Caliban—to return to The Tempest—Caliban’s very name seems to justify, you know, what happened to him. This human magician, Prospero, who was shipwrecked on this island with his daughter Miranda, had imprisoned Caliban.

BOAGEV: And he also fears that if Miranda and Caliban got together, they’d spawn a tribe of monsters, right? They would “people this isle with Calibans.”

DAVIES: “People this isle with Calibans.” So, Caliban boasts of this. If Miranda and Caliban could have fertile children, that would, again, dissolve the boundary between the human and monster. Since Caliban has already been framed as monstrified—he’s, you know, partly descended from the devil—you see that process of monstrification here very, very clearly, this pathologizing or of excluding an individual or a group of beings in order to create separate categories where there aren’t any or separate categories where you fear there aren’t any.

Today, I mean, if we don’t really care that we’re descended from apes or from Neanderthals, then we don’t really mind if there’s a no boundary between human and animal. But if you do mind, if it’s significant for how you understand yourself or the future of your soul, that it’s clear where human ends and animal begins, some kind of place in the continuum, you need to like break that apart.

BOAGEV: Yeah. I imagine you reread The Tempest while you were writing this book, is that right?

DAVIES: I did indeed.

BOGAEV: Yeah. So, what struck you most looking at it fresh through this lens of monster making? Either about Caliban or whether Shakespeare shows more humanity in his treatment of this character than perhaps other writers of the period show characters of different ethnicity or race?

DAVIES: Caliban does get to speak for himself. He boasts that he might have, “Peopled this isle with Caliban.” So, he is not afraid to say that he too has agency. He points out that this island, it was in his view, his own, and that he was pushed from it. So, you could say that, accidentally or intentionally, Shakespeare’s offering a post-colonial critique. Someone who lost his island is saying that he has been dispossessed and that this is unacceptable according to his laws. Now…

BOAGEV: That he has rights as a human being, as we understand it, his indigenous rights.

DAVIES: He has rights.

BOAGEV: Yeah.

DAVIES: Yeah.

BOAGEV: And for all these reasons you describe Shakespeare’s time as an inflection point in the history of monster making and how—and this is maybe another side note but it’s just so interesting how these ideas are lost and then resurfaced. For instance, you describe how ancient ideas about monsters from Aristotle were partly forgotten in Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire. But then in this time of turning back to the classics and of great social churn and anxiety, they resurfaced—this is back in the 13th century in medieval England. Now, in Shakespeare’s time,  it pops up again in terms of a lot of anxiety about women, and gender, and sex, and folklore about if a pregnant woman sees a monster or even has an evil thought, she’ll give birth to a monster. That had a resurgence in the medieval era that just persisted right up until the Enlightenment and you called this fear of monstrous births an obsession in Shakespeare’s time, in 16th century, 17th century England, almost a meme.

DAVIES: Yes, it is. I think the 16th century is by far the most significant century for understanding the last 2,000 years of human history and where we are today.

So, you have this perfect storm—the age of exploration and that existential crisis about space and monsters. Then, you have the era of religious reformation in the early 16th century, and suddenly you have, you know, the witch hunt, you have polemical pamphlets that are reading about individual monstrous births—like say, cows with two heads—are being read as signs that God is unhappy with either the established Church or the Protestants, depending on what side you’re on.

But of course monstrous births also have something profound to do with gender and with women, because that practice of generation, you know, of fetus being created and growing and then being born was something that was pretty mysterious. No one had any idea what the hell went on until a child was born and then they may or may not have the standard number of limbs. They may not be born and live very long. There were fears about what might bring that about. One powerful interpretation of monstrous births was that the imagination of a woman was powerful enough to change the shape of a fetus. So, if you were pregnant and saw something frightening that being might imprint on the fetus. There was this one man servant who assembled a monster compendium around the year 1700—

BOAGEV: Samuel Pepys’ man servant—

DAVIES: Samuel Pepys’ man servant, no less, a James—

BOAGEV: —had a scrapbook, a monster scrapbook.

DAVIES: He had a monster scrapbook that you can go and see in the British Library. Not only did James Paris du Plessis accidentally, supposedly, dig up a monstrous birth in his own family garden when he was a child but his own mother-in-law supposedly saw a lobster in a market in London and ended up giving birth to a monster child.

But, you know, this is also an era in which you couldn’t test paternity—indeed, until the era of genetic testing, you couldn’t be sure who the father of a child was—and yet, aristocratic titles was passed down through the male line, property would pass down through the male line. So, you needed to tell stories about who the father was and then deal with what to do if the child looked very different from the father. The fact that you couldn’t control what happened inside a woman or maybe even everything they did was something that became tied up with monsters.

Of course, the great monarch of Shakespeare’s time, Elizabeth I, was uncommon in some ways in that the quote, unquote “normal way” of behaving for a noble woman or a queen was to simply be in the background and have children, especially male children, who could then inherit property and inherit titles. Elizabeth I, of course, became the queen regnant. She was a queen who ruled as monarch and didn’t have a husband. She was, you know, kind of behaving out of character.

BOAGEV: I’m going to ask the big question now, which is, do you see us now at a similar hinge point to Shakespeare’s time in the history of monster making because of the rise of AI, and space exploration, and conflicts over gender fluidity, and multiculturalism? And do you see these ancient ideas about faith in modern day biases?

DAVIES: There are, you know, so many new forms of monster making going on right now. We are certainly seeing old stories of monster making being repurposed today, you know: age old fears about people of different faiths, somehow maybe not being quote, unquote “legitimate, full, trustworthy citizens,” the idea of women and women’s bodies needing control, you know, that is a very ancient story. But the thing is monster making is a very hungry and contagious practice. Once monster making rhetoric is out there, it just eats, you know, one group after another.

BOAGEV: Well, it goes right to our lizard brain, doesn’t it? I mean, this is atavistic behavior.

DAVIES: That activating of the lizard brain, you know, the way, certainly, people who are agitating to monstrify groups are trying to kind of reach into our brains and turn off the empathy button, to make it okay to give human beings just like them, to make it okay to not treat them like human.

You mentioned AI and tech—by deciding what tech is for, people are redefining what humans are. I ran into someone who thought it would be great that people were starting to get tech to, you know, machines to, write poetry. This was five years ago and I thought, “Well, why do you think that would be a good idea?” He said, “Well, it would be great for machines to write poetry because then we won’t have to.” But he missed the point on multiple levels. People want to figure out what’s in their own minds. They want to figure out what they think about things, and they want to grow by actually stretching their own brains, and you don’t do that if you ask a machine to write poetry. I said to him, “Well, if robots are writing poetry, what would we do instead?” He said, “We could watch movies.” It’s not an either-or. You know, I write things and I watch movies. But this is like saying, “Oh, I want to be an Olympic athlete. I’m just going to put some DVDs on of Olympians training and that’s going to make my muscles stronger.”

BOAGEV: While the cyborg wins the races for me

DAVIES: While the cyborg wins the race.

BOAGEV: Well, the android.

DAVIES: But really the experience of being a kind of sentient being of like whatever species is of experiencing what your mind and body can do, not what some machine can do, and there’s a very dangerous story. I think it’s especially dangerous for say kids who are still in school or just entering college. It’s a story about what humans can do and not being enough. Those models suck up content that is somebody else’s intellectual property that was fed in there without asking anyone. So, right from the start, the way the kind of creative industry tech has been developed into so-called AI is so fundamentally dehumanizing as to basically be telling stories about how anybody made of flesh and blood is actually not necessary, and should be thrown out of an airlock.

BOAGEV: You write about, towards the end, monster-futurism or a monster-centered ethics. So, what would that look like in this age? What do we need to honor humanity in the age of the android, and the cyborg, and AI, and this technology you’ve been talking about.

DAVIES: For a start, monster doesn’t have to mean something bad. If it’s just a category breaker. If we decide that, “Oh, well, categories are so yesterday” and we want to explore what it means to be human in a peaceful fashion in every shape and form, then—and remember that each one of us is unique, you know—if each one of us is wondrous then nobody’s a monster per se.

Monster-futurism is this word that I dreamt up, really inspired by the kind of arts and literature of the movement known as Afrofuturism. You know, sci-fi and fantasy contains a lot of models for better ways for people to interact with each other—and this is where I say the tech bro seems to take away exactly the wrong messages and you wonder how much attention they actually paid to Star Trek, if they were really did watch it or merely pretending that they did—but only by embracing all of the possibilities of being human that we see around us that we can actually fully give ourselves permission to be every version of ourselves, you know. By recognizing the humanity of others, you know, we don’t give away our own rights and freedoms.

BOAGEV: Or power.

DAVIES: Or power. And we don’t dehumanize ourselves, in fact, we demonstrate our humanity by recognizing it in others.

BOAGEV: Oh, I could talk to you forever, but I’m afraid I’m going to have to say goodbye. Thank you so much for the book.

DAVIES: Thank you so much for having me. It’s been a pleasure.

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KARIM-COOPER: That was Surekha Davies, interviewed by Barbara Bogaev. Humans: A Monstrous History, is out now from the University of California Press.

This episode was produced by Matt Frassica. Garland Scott is the executive producer. It was edited by Gail Kern Paster. We had technical help from Nat Hardy in Boston and Voice Trax West in Studio City, California. Our web producer is Paola García Acuña. Leonor Fernandez edits our transcripts. Final mixing services provided by Clean Cuts at Three Seas, Inc.

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