Monsters and Borders in the Early Modern Imagination

Jana Byars, Hans Peter Broedel, Jana Byars, Hans Peter Broedel

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9780429878855
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

This edited collection explores the axis where monstrosity and borderlands meet to reflect the tensions, apprehensions, and excitement over the radical changes of the early modern era. The book investigates the monstrous as it acts in liminal spaces in the Renaissance and the era of Enlightenment. Zones of interaction include chronological change – from the early New World encounters through the seventeenth century – and cultural and scientific changes, in the margins between national boundaries, and also cultural and intellectual boundaries.

1 Creating Monstrosity in Colonial Spanish America

Robert C. Schwaller

Monsters represent a deep-seated historical category within western culture, rooted in a fear of the unknown and the desire to fill that unknown landscape with peoples, especially terrible ones.¹ Most monsters derive from antiquity, but medieval scholarship including Christian theology accepted monsters and incorporated them into the European worldview.² Spanish conquistadors, settlers, and bureaucrats were heirs to this tradition and approached the New World with this framework. When exploring, conquering, and establishing colonies, this mindset represented an omnipresent reference. In many cases, Europeans noted the lack of the various monsters of antiquity, or believed those monsters existed just beyond their reach in unexplored parts of the Americas. As exploration advanced, the lack of interaction with tangible monsters did not lead to an abandonment of the cultural mindset of monstrosities. Instead, the cultural framework of monstrosity subtly shifted over the course of the sixteenth century. As European interaction with Native Americans increased, the language of monstrosity, especially its social and moral components, began to be mapped onto the people groups of the Americas. The debate over Native American’s humanity revolved around such categorizations.³ Even after the state and Church agreed that Native Americans were fully human, the association of monstrous attributes continued to shape the discriminatory legal and social position held by indios.

Additionally, the economic and demographic forces of Spanish colonialism led to the inclusion of new people who could be imbued with monstrous qualities. Sub-Saharan Africans, a people who had long existed at the margins of European thought, became an increasingly numerous segment of the Iberian and Spanish American population with the growth of the sixteenth-century slave trade.⁴ Even before the discovery of Native Americans, black African bodies had been incorporated into European representations of monstrosity.⁵ The formation of new groups descended from the founding population of Europeans, Africans, and Native Americans provided new bodies upon which to map western notions of monstrosity. Mestizos, descendants of Europeans and Native Americans, alongside mulatosand zambaigos, descendants of Africans with Europeans and Native Americans, inherited the monstrous attributes of their parent groups.

Just as the ancient and early modern fear of monsters stemmed from anxiety over the unknown, the uncontrollable, and the unconquered, so too did colonial fears of monstrosity base themselves in concerns over dangerous subjects and vast territories.⁶ The Spanish Conquest of the Americas always remained incomplete. Especially in the sixteenth century, unconquered indigenous people lurked at the margins of Spanish territory, indigenous rebellions threatened Spanish dominion, and cimarrones (runaway slaves) established independent kingdoms in remote areas beyond the reach of the Spanish state. Within Spanish America, indigenous people outnumbered all other groups, in most places. In many major cities, African slaves were as numerous as Spanish settlers, and by the end of the sixteenth century individuals of mixed ancestry had become a significant and growing minority.

During this period, Spaniards began to map aspects of social and moral monstrosity onto the subaltern subjects of the empire. In Spain itself, the fear of monsters on the margins transformed into a fear of internal social deviants and the language of monstrosity shifted to describe deviant groups including Conversos, Moriscos, and women.⁷ In the Americas new categories of people, including mestizos, mulatos, zambaigos, and cimarrones, became the monstrous deviants of society. Nevertheless, this shift was not a direct adaptation of monsters of antiquity to New World populations. Mulatos did not become the New World’s Cyclopes, although elites perceived them as monstrous members of the social order.

The paradigm of European monsters can be defined by three common attributes.⁸ First, they were based on hearsay and rumor, always located at a distance. Second, they had recognizable human forms, but were usually deformed in some way. Third, their physical, social, and moral descriptions tend to emphasize reversals or negations of ‘normal’ characteristics. In transforming subaltern subjects into monstrous groups, this paradigm shifted. No longer were these monstrosities located in unknown areas; they lived within the social order. Yet, elite stereotypes of such groups were often based more in fear than fact, mirroring the hearsay and rumors that defined earlier monsters. Physically these new subaltern monsters were less grotesque than fabled monsters, although physical attributes could still be mobilized to depict monstrosity. The greatest similarity between subaltern groups within early modern Spanish society and the monsters of antiquity lay in their moral and social qualities. These groups were perceived of being antagonistic to the standards and expectations of civilized society and in this sense continued to represent reversals or negations of civilization.

This essay argues that the language of monstrosity provides a unique window into understanding the development of Spanish American society. As the monsters of antiquity lost salience, Spanish exploration and conquest created new monsters out of its subaltern subjects, especially indios, mestizos, mulatos, and negros. Spanish elites perceived these groups as threats to the developing order and in turn appropriated the language of monstrosity to deride and stigmatize them. In the developing colonial context, the supposed degenerate and destabilizing qualities of these groups became the focus of colonial elite discourse. As with older monsters, the language of monstrosity reflected fears of disorder, deviance, and danger and was rooted in the belief that their social and moral attributes represented a negation or rejection of the Spanish colonial ideal. Finally, the Spanish use of monstrosity to describe these subjects illustrates tensions within the developing colonial order. Many of the fears that gave rise to monstrous descriptions were based in methods and patterns of Spanish economic exploitation and social development. In this sense, the discourse of monstrosity in colonial Spanish America speaks more to tensions within the colonial system than it does of those groups described in monstrous terms.

From Homer to Columbus

The origin of western monsters can be traced at least as far back as Homer and other Greek authors of the first millennium BCE.⁹ In The Odyssey, Odysseus encountered the monstrous Cyclops. The monstrosity of Cyclops is represented by his deviant physical appearance and his barbarousness and lack of civility. Later Greek historians, including Herodotus and Ktésias, described various monsters inhabiting the lands beyond the known world. In the first century, the Roman author and naturalist Pliny chronicled a vast host of monsters presumed to inhabit the far-off lands of the East.¹⁰ As with Cyclops, most “races” of monsters deviated from the normal human condition in their physical and moral attributes. Thus, the monsters of antiquity represented deviance both in appearance and behavior.¹¹

The cultural fascination with monsters survived antiquity and during the medieval period monsters remained salient subjects of study. Theologians including St. Augustine and Isidore of Seville both considered monsters to be inherent parts of God’s creation. In considering the moral place of monsters within the Christian cosmology, Augustine argued that monsters descended from Adam like all other humans. He argued that monsters diverged from the rest of humanity by claiming they were descendants of Noah’s cursed son Ham.¹² In Genesis 9:18–28, after Ham looked upon his father’s nakedness his descendants were cursed to serve those of his brothers Shem and Japheth. Augustine linked the curse born by Ham’s lineage to the degenerated physical and moral qualities of monsters.

By the fourteenth century the ‘Curse of Ham’ had begun to be mobilized by Christian and Muslim theologians to describe the perceived inferiority and servile nature of sub-Saharan, black Africans.¹³ The chronicles of Gomes Eannes de Azurara provide a clear indication of how the Portuguese explorers of the fifteenth century perceived sub-Saharan Africans. Like other contemporaries, Azuara explained the enslavement of sub-Saharans as the result of the Curse of Ham.¹⁴ Furthermore, he described their social and moral condition in terms that echoed the monstrous attributes of antiquity.

Of their souls, while they were pagan, they lacked the clarity and light of the Holy Faith, and of their bodies, because they lived like beasts, without the order of reasonable beings, since they did not know bread or wine, nor covering of clothing, nor the shelter of a home, and the worst was their great ignorance, because of which they lacked any understanding of good, and could only live in bestial idleness.¹⁵

Although Azuara used this language of monstrosity, he did not actually think that these Africans were non-human. In fact, he included the earlier description in order to create a contrast between Africans’ natural condition and their lives as baptized Christian slaves in Portuguese homes. Nevertheless, the link between the monsters of antiquity and black Africans would help facilitate the mapping of monstrous qualities on to Africans and their descendants for centuries to come.

When Columbus ventured into the Atlantic, many expected him to find some of the races described by Pliny. He did not, at least not with his own eyes. In fact, Columbus and his men described the people of Hispaniola in decidedly glowing terms:

they were all people more handsome and of better quality than any of the others they had found up to that point … having been made clear that all those who were found on the other islands were of very good quality. And as to ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Creating Monstrosity in Colonial Spanish America
• 2 The Mermaid of Edam Meets Medical Science: Empiricism and the Marvelous in Seventeenth-Century Zoological Thought
• 3 Bleeding Bodies and Bondage: Signifiers of Illegitimacy in Ghirlandaio’s Adoration of the Magi and Andrea della Robbia’s Tondi at the Ospedale degli Innocenti, Florence
• 4 “In Questa Guerra Tutti Ne È Stà Turchi”: The Turk as Ultimate Enemy in Sixteenth-Century Italy
• 5 Alpine Cannibals: French Renaissance Representations of the Alps and Their Residents
• 6 Imagining the Amazon: Monstrous Discourses about Gynocracy in Elizabethan England
• 7 Columbus’s Monsters: One-Eyed Men, Dog-Headed Men, Cannibals, and Amazons in the Accounts of the First Two Columbian Voyages
• 8 Monsters and Men in the Wild New World: A Study of the Monstrous in Girolamo Benzoni’s Historia del Mondo Nuovo
• 9 “A True Narrative of the Grievous Affliction of Roger Sterrop in Somer Islands”: Demonic Possession and the Puritan Project in Early Seventeenth-Century Bermuda
• 10 Montaigne’s Mercurial Masculinity
• 11 Bigfoot Meets the Wild Man: Monstrous Borders Between Contemporary American and Early Modern European Culture
• Contributors
• Index