Monstrous-birth panics spiked under Elizabeth I, marking anxiety over female rule

Evidence

Other monsters were found at home, showing that the belief in supernatural creatures was not restricted to the appeal of the exotic and foreign. Stories of monstrous births surged with the reign of Elizabeth I, symptomatic of the male anxiety provoked by women in power. Domestic political events were often blamed on the birth or sudden appearance of non-human or hybrid creatures. In 1645, a pamphlet claimed that the birth of monsters served as an ominous sign of the first English Civil War: “Hath not Nature altered her course so much, that women frame of pure flesh and blood bring forth ugly and deformed Monsters; and contrariwise, Beasts bringeth forth humane shapes contrary to their kind.” Reports of monsters were made in the American colonies as well, often in reference to religious and political outsiders, as found in the stories and artistic depictions of Mary Dyer’s monstrous infant. — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 239

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s parallel interest in manufactured scapegoat figures in other books — monsters as containers for political anxiety, echoing the monster/demon/giant projection thesis.
• ADDENDUM: Shows a complementary, non-Muslim strand of the same projection mechanism the 3 published articles rely on — moral panic over bodies framing identity.