Julie Crawford's Marvelous Protestantism: Monstrous Births in Post-Reformation England takes as its focus the pamphlets, broadsheets, and ballads about monstrous births circulating in England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Noting that these texts have generally been treated dismissively—their survival indicative of popular fascination with the sensational and insignificant suddenly available in an emergent print culture—Crawford argues instead that such texts offer “spectacularly legible” (3) accounts of Reformation Protestantism; they articulate the relationship between the material and the immaterial worlds, the sociopolitical body of England and its secret interiors. Catching the eyes of a curious readership in order to reform them, the genre of monstrous births visually reproduces (often, through one-of-a-kind woodcuts) the errant nature of women's bodies and minds, but it also moves beyond gender to critique matters of sociopolitical and religious controversy on a national level, from sartorial excess to political equivocation to religious schism to claims of spiritual empowerment. Crawford powerfully illustrates that monstrous births create a nexus of visual, interpretive, and printing practices that, read with skilled attention to their historical, religious, and sociopolitical valence, offer a wonderfully complicated glimpse of early modern culture.
In her introduction, Crawford examines the “birth” of Protestantism as more than metaphorical by analyzing the place that women played in reproducing its contours. The genre of “monstrous births” implicitly acknowledges the full range of women's reproductive power while explicitly condemning the secret sins that such births make visible. Even punitive and judgmental interpretations cannot be the whole story, Crawford argues, since stories are always altered in reception, increasing sympathy for those represented and even dissent.
In chapter 1, “Protestant Reform and the Fashion Monster” (27–61), Crawford traces indictments against clothing through prodigious births (this time animal births), beginning with Luther's “monk-calf.” Highlighting the foolishness of attaining sanctity through clothing, the monk-calf's judgment carries over, in Elizabeth's time, to concerns about vestments and secular fashion. When a “ruffed child” (a baby with fleshlike ruffs around its neck) is born in unreformed Chichester, it becomes a sign for a locale given to excesses in secular fashion and badly in need of a preaching ministry: the “ruffed child” reinforces both Elizabethan sartorial law and puritan reform.
In chapter 2, “The Mother of a Monster, and Not of an Orderly Birth” (62–87), Crawford examines two stories of women who give birth to monsters in more detail: the first, a woman who thrice flouts the social conventions of her marriage contract and the second, a vagabond who is cared for in Kent despite vagrancy laws against it. Both births “provide ethico-religious guidelines for dealing with controversial issues” (86): the first monster, with a deformed ring finger, suggests the perils of marital transgression, while the second infects the imaginations of the Kentish community.
In chapter 3, “Forms of a More Perfect Union” (88–113), Crawford describes how a monstrous “double child” born in Standish, Lancashire, offers Puritan minister William Leigh an opportunity to analyze its implications on local and national levels: for Leigh, the “double child” is at once a visible sign of hidden fornication and a material representation of England's two-faced Head, James I, who, in acknowledging the place of equivocation in religious difference has created an “imperfect union” between Protestantism and popery.
Stories of monstrous births increased during the English Civil War when questions of conformity and religious order became still more volatile. In chapter 4, “Heedless Women, Headless Monsters, and the Wars of Religion” (114–45), Crawford analyzes a series of pamphlets published by Parliament about headless babes, born when Dissenting women refuse to heed their husbands or church authority. Their words, similarly rash, are fulfilled against their expectations when they deliver headless children who incarnate their schismatic beliefs, mirroring the separation of material body from sanctioned head.
In chapter 5, “The Ranter's Monster and the Children of God” (146–70), Crawford focuses on a series of women who claim to be God's spiritual intermediaries, among these Anne Hutchinson and Mary Adams. Although Hutchinson's spiritual activities are off limits to the male gaze, her error becomes public when she and one of her most devoted followers, Mary Dyer, deliver “monsters.” Mary Adams's still more striking claim to be pregnant with Christ culminates in imprisonment when she too delivers a monster—a birth undermining her claims and reinforcing the evils of sectarian heresy. Mary Adams's story—suggested by her name—may be a politicized and instructive fable, one dependent less on truth than on the press and its readership.
With England's “rebirth” in the restoration, Crawford concludes in “Signs of the Times” (171–86), prodigy stories become associated with superstition and fanaticism, not just because of scientific empiricism but also because of a desire to lessen their hold on an audience. While monstrous births were earlier understood as a product of the ungoverned female imagination, now such stories are. The “monstrous birth” cited here is tellingly cut off from its mother and her environment. Brought into the world by a skilled physician, it is preserved by an embalmer. Even when a birth story is occasionally read in the old way, the hand of God in such matters encourages general repentance, resisting altogether the interpretive grip of post-Reformation England.
In this thoroughly researched and brilliant close reading of monstrous births in early modern culture, Crawford establishes a lively new trajectory for early modern studies, illuminating to scholars and students alike. These texts clearly inform the imaginations of William Shakespeare, Edmund Spenser, and John Milton as well as Aemilia Lanyer and Mary Wroth who gave birth out of wedlock. They make us wonder what women themselves felt and said when confronted not only with their own reproductive loss but also with the divine and sociopolitical judgment here put into circulation. They point, in my view, to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.
