‘Monstrous foetus’ in Fortunio Liceti’s On monsters, Amsterdam, 1665.

This copy of Fortunio Liceti’s De monstris came into The John Rylands Library from the collection of David Lloyd Roberts (1835–1920). Roberts was a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians. He came from Stockport and had trained at the Manchester School of Medicine before going on to practise medicine in Manchester in various capacities for the rest of his career. He was a collector of books, manuscripts and art and had wide scholarly interests in addition to his medical practice. Lloyd Roberts was a successful gynaecologist. He took up a post as gynaecological surgeon to the Manchester Royal Infirmary in 1885 and published two books on midwifery: The Practice of Midwifery (1857) and A Student’s Guide to Practical Midwifery, (1876). Lloyd Roberts appears to have had an interest in the monstrous. Also in his collection was a small eighteenth-century manuscript (Rylands Italian MS 63) containing fifty-four images of monsters or marvels.

Conjoined twins were a common subject of discussion and representation in books on monsters. Where they survived birth, they could be the objects of significant public interest and there are several examples of such twins ‘touring’ so that they, their relatives or guardians, could make money. In his De Monstres (1573) the French surgeon Ambroise Paré (c. 1510–90) mentioned the case of conjoined girls born in Verona in 1475 whose parents took them to a number of cities in Italy in order to make money from those willing to pay for the privilege of seeing such an unusual manifestation of Nature’s power. During the lifetimes of Liceti (1577–1657) and Gerard Blasius (1627–82), probably the most famous conjoined twins were Lazarus and John Baptista Colloredo (1617–after 1646) who toured Europe. It was reported that John Baptista was a parasitic twin, who hung at the side of his mobile brother, did not speak, and kept his eyes closed and mouth open.

Blasius, like many other medical professionals at the time, was interested in conjoined twins as a naturally occurring medical phenomenon, often explained as the result of excess matter. The engraving in Blasius’s appendix of De monstris makes it clear, through the use of extensive alphabetical labelling, that the twins are to be viewed within the context of scientific enquiry.

However, broadsheets during this period regularly reported monstrous births as portents – of both positive and negative significance. The birth of a child in the French city of Bayonne in 1677 was accompanied by supernatural signs including very rough seas, a cloud touching houses in the city, and lights moving through the skies. The child was reported as having thirty-three eyes and living for thirty-three days, a clear reference to the thirty-three years that Christ lived on earth. Monstrous births fascinated because of their otherness. They were outside normal expectations and, as such, called out for explanation from the religious or scientific communities who account for their ‘foreign-ness’ in different ways.

Danielle Gravon & Cordelia Warr, University of Manchester