Monstrous births served as political omens blamed on women rulers and outsiders.
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
Category: Factual Claims
- XREF: Connects directly to ‘Complaints About Immodesty Go Way Back’ — both track elite/class anxieties projected onto bodies and dress. Also parallels the reader’s core thesis: monster-making as projection of domestic anxiety onto a convenient other.
- SEED: Angle: monstrous births as a recurring panic metric across eras — how do societies read ‘nature altered her course’ as a referendum on those in power? Could frame the Islamic monster alongside Elizabethan birth-monsters as the same projective machinery.