Lessons & scholynges for us all : Monsters as signs in early modern popular literature

This dissertation focuses on the significance of monsters in early modern popular literature. The etymological roots of the word monster include “to demonstrate” and “to warn”: in the words of one broadsheet, monsters “ar lessons & scholynges for us all.” I examine representations of monsters in a body of largely unexamined texts, ranging from books of marvels to ‘ephemera’ such as broadsheets, pamphlets, newsbooks and play-pamphlets, and argue that the birth of a monster signals a crisis in the reproduction of social norms and institutions, from fashion edicts to the English revolution. Moreover, I argue that monsters\u27 deformities are transparent to the crimes they punish, and thus that monsters provide access to the specific details of early modern controversies. I begin with an introduction of the history of scholarship on monsters and popular literature. Chapter 2 examines the ways early seventeenth-century popular ballads and pamphlets deployed signs of monstrosity in the service of socially conservative projects, especially as indictments of women\u27s transgressive activities. Chapter 3 focuses on the analogy of the body politic and its relation to the “many-headed monster,” and Chapter 4 discusses the role of women in the body politic during the English civil wars, focusing on a series of play-pamphlets about “Mistris Parliament” who is “brought to bed of a monstrous childe of reformation .” Chapter 5 turns to the beliefs of recusant and sectarian women and the headless monsters they produce, arguing that these monsters are not just the signs of women\u27s punishment and control, but of their resistance. Throughout “Lessons & scholynges for us all ,” I argue that although monsters were meant to moralize and naturalize institutions and behaviors, they just as often revealed the instability inherent in any type of reproduction. The monsters in these popular texts often serve as punishments for women, but the stories of their production are not simply admonitory: in them are the signs of uncontained subversion and the possibility for more of the same