Medieval monsters, in theory and practice.

The past two decades have witnessed a plethora of studies on the medieval monster. These studies have contributed significantly to our understanding of religion, art, literature, and science in the Middle Ages. However, a tendency to treat the medieval monster in purely symbolic and psychological terms ignores the lived experiences of impaired medieval people and their culture's attitudes toward them. With the aid of recent insights provided by disability studies, this article aims to confront "real" medieval monsters--e.g., physically impaired human beings--in both their human and monstrous aspects.

Leonardo Da Vinci, the genius and the monsters. Casual encounters?

This article analyses Leonardo's interest in monsters and deformed reality, one of the lesser known aspects of his vast and multifaceted output. With the possible exception of his studies of physiognomy, relevant drawings, sketches and short stories represent a marginal aspect of his work, but they are nevertheless significant for historians of teratology. The purpose of this study is to provide a broad overview of the relationship between Leonardo and both the literature on mythological monsters and the reports on monstrous births that he either read about or witnessed personally. While aspects of his appreciation and attention to beauty and the pursuit of perfection and good proportions are the elements most emphasised in Leonardo's work, other no less interesting aspects related to deformity have been considered of marginal importance. My analysis will demonstrate that Leonardo approached the realm of monstrosity as if he considered abnormality a mirror of normality, deformity a mirror of harmony, and disease a mirror of health, as if to emphasise that, ultimately, it is the monster that gives the world the gift of normality. Two special cases of monstrosity are analysed: the famous monster of Ravenna, whose image was found among his papers, and a very rare case of parasitic conjoined twins (thoracopagus parasiticus) portrayed for the first time alive, probably in Florence, by Leonardo himself.

The woman who gave birth to a dog Monstrosity and bestiality in Quaestiones Medico-Legales by Paolo Zacchia.

The Italian Paolo Zacchia (1584-1659) is considered one of the fathers of forensic medicine. From a letter sent by the physician and botanist Pietro Castelli, the article seeks to reconstruct the opinions that Zacchia expressed about monsters in his monumental Quaestiones Medico-Legales. Although he did not seem too sure about the possibility that a hybrid could be born from the union of a man and a beast, he believed that God intervened, allowing the birth so that the abomination could be discovered. The opinion of Zacchia is related to the image that people had at the time of the relationship between humans and animals.

"Monstre". Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire and the science of monstrosity.

This article aims at analyzing the entry "Monstre", written by Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire in 1827 and included in the Dictionnaire classique d'histoire naturelle. Under Etienne Geoffroy the study of monsters brought new heuristic and theoretical approaches to the research fields of anatomy and embryology, and acquired the status of a scientific discipline having its own theoreticalfoundations and therefore its own standards for classification, seen as non-random means for revealing a groundbreaking knowledge.

Teratology in Mexico. 19th Century.

It was not until the last third of the 19th century, the period in which, according to historiography, the country definitely inserted itself into modernity, that anomalies and monstrosities had a presence in Mexico. Therefore, what I present here are four moments of teratology in Mexico, four dates in which I try to recount how teratology, which still occupied a marginal place within the main themes of national science, not only reached to cover the realm of medical discussions at the time, but also laid the foundations for new disciplines like biology and anthropology.

"Pur sarripu pursa trutin": monster-fighting and medicine in early medieval Scandinavia.

This paper seeks evidence among our extensive Scandinavian mythological texts for an area which they seldom discuss explicitly: the conceptualisation and handling of illness and healing. Its core evidence is two runic texts (the Canterbury Rune-Charm and the Sigtuna Amulet) which conceptualise illness as a "purs" ("ogre, monster"). The article discusses the semantics of "purs," arguing that illness and supernatural beings could be conceptualised as identical in medieval Scandinavia. This provides a basis for arguing that myths in which gods and heroes fight monsters provided a paradigm for the struggle with illness.