Sometime around 1537, Petrus Gonzales was born on Tenerife with a rare genetic disorder that made hair grow all over his face and across his body. He was recognized as one of the “wild” or “dog-faced” men believed to exist at the outer reaches of the world, and was sent as a curiosity to the French court of Henry II and Catherine de’ Medici. There, he was raised as a courtier, married a smooth-faced woman and had at least seven children with her. Most of them shared his furriness and also became minor court celebrities, but eventually settled together in an Italian village and fell from historical record.
Merry Wiesner-Hanks in The Marvelous Hairy Girls has now carefully reconstructed the story of the Gonzales family, and especially of the three hairy daughters, Maddalena, Francesca and Antonietta. Although the sources are sparse, they include evocative paintings and medical records; and Wiesner-Hanks makes the most of them by sensitively drawing out the attitudes behind the artistic, religious and scientific interest in the hairy family. In her hands, the contemporary reactions to the Gonzales sisters become a kaleidoscope which offers a beguilingly rich and in-depth view of sixteenth-century European society, mentality and beliefs.
Though much of the background material is well known, Wiesner-Hanks expertly summarizes it from a position taking in the latest scholarship, and makes it not only accessible but highly enjoyable to specialists and non-specialists alike. She wonders, for example, what might have persuaded Catherine Gonzales to marry a “monster” like Petrus. As there are no direct records, she sketches what sixteenth-century women might have expected of marriage, giving concise descriptions of the changes in wedding customs from informal agreements between a man and a woman to public social events, and of the role of romantic love. She plausibly concludes that Petrus’s guaranteed income as a court curiosity probably played a part, as well as perhaps love or tolerance or “Beauty and the Beast”-type fantasies.
Similarly, the fact that Petrus Gonzales was represented at court as a Guanche, a sheep-fur-clad native of the Canaries rather than a descendant of the European immigrants, gives occasion for a brief history of the colonization of these islands, which resulted in a wish to construct a native origin for what was, by the sixteenth century, a mixed ethnic group. The inclusion of the Gonzales’ images in collections of monsters or curiosities allows Wiesner-Hanks to discuss medieval and early modern attitudes to unusual creatures, characterized by an acute awareness that humans are not fundamentally different from other animals. When she describes the birth of the couple’s hairy children, she delves deep into Renaissance birthing practices and theories, including the medical opinion that “monstrous births” are sometimes due to the mother seeing something startling at the moment of conception or during pregnancy, which impresses its shape on the foetus. The fact that such traits could persist across generations was ascribed not to genes but to nature’s drive to replicate its forms.
Like many senior historians, Wiesner-Hanks has adopted an emotive, literary style. Instead of referencing every statement and giving only the “facts”, she aims at a more general audience with gracious, light-hearted prose, and replaces extensive footnotes with brief recommendations for further reading on each of her topics. The book’s handsome looks (somewhat marred by the low quality of the illustrations) contribute to its wide appeal. An openness to an unusual topic of historical inquiry – to monsters rather than just to the kings who owned them, the artists who painted them, the scientists who studied them or the theologians who explained them – is accompanied by an openness to unusual methods of presenting its results. Historians of monstrosity such as Robert Bartlett, Caroline Walker Bynum, Lorraine Daston, Katherine Park and now Wiesner-Hanks are pioneering, at least implicitly, an attitude that could serve as a model for historical endeavour in general. Rather than treating their “monsters” as passive objects of scientific analysis or of gawping astonishment, their work is characterized first and foremost by respect. Wiesner-Hanks is unwavering in her thoughtful presentation of the Gonzales sisters as individuals who can look back at us across time and challenge our own perceptions of disabilities and disorders. The latter owe more to the Renaissance than we might think: although large quantities of facial and body hair are now perceived mainly as a medical problem rather than as a topic of philosophical and artistic reflection, it was named “Ambras syndrome” by nineteenth-century medical doctors after the palace where most of the Gonzales’ portraits hung. The Gonzales’ history casts a long shadow, and Merry Wiesner-Hanks has brought it into deservedly sharp relief.
Another famous “monster” briefly mentioned by Wiesner-Hanks and discussed by Jennifer Spinks in her book on Monstrous Births and Visual Culture in Sixteenth-Century Germany is the monk-calf, born near the German town of Freiberg in 1522 – a calf with an unusual extra skin-fold around the back of the neck that reminded people of a monk’s cowl. This calf became famous through the flourishing distribution of broadsheets, and especially because Martin Luther, with Philipp Melanchthon, wrote a pamphlet in which he interpreted it as a sign showing the degeneracy of the religious orders (whose clothes, like the calf’s “hood”, gave the impression of piety, but whose true nature was not spiritual).
Spinks tells a somewhat less ambitious story than Wiesner-Hanks, but does a lot more legwork. She traces the development of the representations of monstrous births in sixteenth-century Germany, where the news of unusually formed children and animals was keenly spread in broadsheets, woodcuts and other printed depictions. Although much of her work consists of careful interpretations of individual texts and images, several trends emerge in the ways in which these people and animals were understood. Most clearly, Spinks’s findings challenge a traditional narrative in which the religious world-view of the Middle Ages is gradually replaced in the Renaissance and early modern periods by a more scientific outlook. Instead, developing arguments of Robert Scribner, Park and Daston, Spinks argues that the broadsheets even bear witness to an increase in religious interest in “monsters” during the Reformation period. Like Luther, both Protestant and Catholic theologians saw strangely shaped creatures as signs of the divine, and used them to argue their opposite cases. The monk calf, for instance, was used not only by the Protestants but also by Johann Nas’s Catholic counter-propaganda as an image for Luther’s own corruption: “Lucifer an ox. Superbia [pride] a cow. Luther their calf”. Like Wiesner-Hanks, Spinks observes that “monsters”, especially the human infants, at the beginning of the century were valued and treated with respect rather than disgust. However, she detects an increasingly apocalyptic trend, interpreting them as portents of the coming of the end of the world, a trend which was exacerbated by worries about a Turkish invasion. As in the Gonzales case, a mistrust of women and their susceptibility to malign influences that affect their unborn children is a subtext of many of these publications.
Interest also shifted from the exotic monstrous races that were believed to inhabit the outer edges of the known world to unusually shaped individuals and animals born in Germany and Europe itself. Always paying close attention to the media which transmitted news of these births, Spinks discusses images by famous artists such as Albrecht Dürer and Hans Burgmaier the Elder, which she finds not as interesting as some of the less polished and realistic renderings. The juxtaposition of image and text in most of her sources allows the monsters to be interpreted piecemeal, where each unusual body part or even pose is ascribed a particular meaning, so that the image in turn becomes readable as a kind of composite narrative in itself. The interest in individual cases did not last long, though: by the 1550s, multitudes of unusual humans and animals were grouped together in collections and books of wonders similar to those into which the Gonzales found their way. 
Lavishly illustrated, beautifully produced and written, Spinks’s investigation, like Merry Wiesner-Hanks’s, proves how fruitful attention to the unusual can be in understanding the typical, mainstream mentalities, beliefs and culture of early modern society. Show me your monsters, and I will show you who you are.
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