Sixteenth-century Europeans believed racial mixing produced monstrous offspring
Evidence
These reports about monstrous births reflect fears surrounding miscegenation. At the same time that Othello, a play about the mixing of races through the sexual union of Othello and Desdemona, is performed on the stage, such creatures were thought to exist. According to European sources from the era, the sexual union of different races and even distinct religions created horrible monsters. Ambroise Paré, a physician who lived in sixteenth-century France, wrote a book on these horrors, titled Des Monstres et Prodiges, in which he described the dangers of such relations: There are monsters that are born with a form that is half-animal and the other human, or retaining everything about them from animals, which are produced by sodomists and atheists who “join together” and break out of their bonds-unnaturally-with animals, and from this are born several hideous monsters that bring great shame to those who look at them or speak of them. — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 312
Categorization
Category: Causal Relationships
- XREF: The miscegenation logic shows what the monster figure lets its makers avoid — the reader’s third guiding question. The monster projects sexual/race anxiety.
- SHARE: Paré’s Des Monstres et Prodiges as a primary source for monstrous-birth literature would interest a Renaissance-studies person.
Related
- European medical texts taught that race-mixing births created monstrous offspring. (similarity 0.94)
- Elizabethan culture framed black-white union as producing monstrous offspring. (similarity 0.85)
- Miscegenation with monstrous others threatens racial purity in the story (similarity 0.80)
- Miscegenation anxiety drives the refusal to create Frankenstein’s monster’s mate (similarity 0.79)