Exception is the subject of an aphorism in Francis Bacon's De dignitate et augmentis scientiarum (1623): when “laws and statutes are concise in style, extend freely; when they enumerate particular cases, [extend] more cautiously . . . exception confirms the force of law in cases not excepted” [The Works of Francis Bacon, ed. James Spedding et al., 14 vols. (London: Longman, 1857–1874), 1.807, 5.91]. Exceptions negatively affirm a class by defying its delimiting criteria, implying that such criteria are defeasible, while enumeration concerns cases added to legal record by reference to similar cases, by the use of examples, or by discretionem sanam (sound discretion). Rhetorical and logical canons—reasoning from similarities, examples, experience—underwrite not only jurisprudence but also political, moral, and natural philosophical inquiry, all of which are susceptible to exception. How, then, does exception animate early modern inquiry?
As Maja Bondestam, editor of Exceptional Bodies in Early Modern Culture: Concepts of Monstrosity before the Advent of the Normal, argues, monstrosity is a contested case in point. While “scholars in the field seldom agree” (23), the essays in this rich, crisp collection do find harmony: exceptional bodies “functioned as ways to understand and order the world,” informing “porous” (13) concepts of life and death, the normal and the pathological, medicine, and natural philosophy, health and longevity—claims forcefully echoed in Kathleen Long's afterword (186–88). Exception appears as both positive and pejorative, as the scholars chart the shift from prurience to perspicacity in the understanding of monstrosity, figured as part of the long march toward, as Bondestam says, the “hegemony of normalcy,” with its longueurs and feints, its fits and starts (16–18). Although the collection is rather more capacious than these Foucauldian formulations, too often Bondestam and her contributors rest on a disputed narrative: monsters vanished from “streets and marketplaces” as they were explained scientifically, and this “rare and sometimes threatening category . . . disappeared” (25, 23–24). But did it? Perhaps in some forms of medical and natural philosophical thought, in which concepts of nature became increasingly cadastral, but the “disappearance” of monstrosity would be news to any fairgoer, circus patron, or raree-show audience—and to many physicians and naturalists—well into the last century.
In the collection itself, exceptional has a variegated cast. Chapter one treats medical-moral conceptions of dance, focusing on the moresca, a mix of theater, pantomime, and “social dancing” vilified as vulgar and disorderly by Counter-Reformation thinkers (43). Nevertheless, cinquecento court medicine recuperated elite social practice by sheltering dance under classical canons of moderation, in the process revealing “tensions and shifting attitudes” about exceptional bodies. Dance is salutary: Maria Kavvadia concludes that physicians redescribed even the lascivious moresca as promotive of comportment and control (54–55) though, curiously, she does not mention that exercise is a traditional constituent of the nonnaturals.
Rosemary Moore examines the composition and circulation, use and misuse of anatomical fugitive sheets—semipopular, often allegorical objects that retail medical knowledge, gender identity, social status, and theological doctrine (66). Her focus is on the sheets in Johann Remmelin's Catoptrum microcosmicum (1619). In one image, under a concealing flap, a monstrous portrait, thought to be Medusa, takes the place of female genitalia. Conventionally understood as a warning against “seeing too much,” Moore rereads Medusa's severed head as a “productive emblem of knowledge and power” in the hope of starting a new dialogue about the illustration's semantic instability (75, 78–79).
The ambition and career of the kyphotic playwright and civil servant Juan Ruiz de Alarcón is Pablo García Piñar's concern in a chapter where he explores elite conceptions of the relation between physical appearance and political authority. Ruiz de Alarcón's deformity disclosed “moral weaknesses” (87), his hunchbacked body incompatible with sixteenth-century Spanish administrative prestige. In courtesy manuals, García Piñar finds an “anatomical canon” conditioned by age, temperament, size, and proportion from which Ruiz de Alarcón diverged: malformations signal “a poor inclination of the soul” incompatible with “the moral rectitude required to legitimise state institutions” (87, 89, 91)—not the king's two bodies, à la Ernst Kantorowicz, but the civil servant's one.
The politics and representation of sexual deformity animate Cécil Tresfels's essay on the “national whore” Marguerite de Valois, subject of the anonymous Divorce satyrique (1660), a poem that purported to the confession of Henry VI, in which the king justifies his divorce by calling Marguerite a perverted “monster” (104). Tresfels explores Marguerite's representation at the intersection of both conventional notions of women as carnal and inconstant, and her “exceptional” status as a figure who exceeds even these assumptions (105). Tresfels reads the satire as “symptomatic of a transitional period in which the definition of monstrosity evolves from external to internal abjection,” Marguerite's hyper, distaff sexuality, “relentless and totalising,” an emblem of moral depravation (106, 109, 114–15). The collocation of women and monstrosity appears in sharp relief in the Divorce satyrique and in Tesfels's spurring chapter.
In chapter 5, Parker Cotton argues that hermaphrodites are symbolic of theological ambiguity in Pierre Bayle's Dictionnaire historique et critique (1697). In “doctrinally charged” articles, Bayle eschews “real” examples for a mythologized hermaphrodite, a “subversive” figure that lends force to Bayle's skeptical theological tilts (124). Readers following the “web” of articles in the dictionary will conclude that Bayle mentions hermaphrodites mostly as satirical figures used to rubbish rational arguments for the existence of evil or as bivalent figures of either toleration or skepticism (133, 137). Wherever it appears, the hermaphrodite is “a disruption of order,” testifying to the broad significance of monstrosity in philosophical enquiry (134, 138).
Bondestam's introduction advances a strong claim for the ways in which examining and collecting exceptional bodies developed and refined “moral values and emotional repertoire” (32), a notion explored fully in her own essay on prodigies in seventeenth-century Sweden. Johannes Schefferus was curious with purpose: gazing at wonders could “educate and morally edify the beholder,” virtue intensified by “illuminating examples and guiding images” (143). Schefferus's work included as morally edifying examples a macrocephalic boy, a humanesque piglet, an enormous gallstone. Bondestam contextualizes these noticing and collecting practices within Sweden's entry into the pan-European vogue for wunderkammern, its medical regime, and its elite cultures. She interrogates Schefferus's participation in revivified discourses about mirabilia and exemplarity, and, as a conclusion, she offers a brisk history of monstrosity itself, in which exceptions become “teachers of virtue” (151, 152–54, 157). Schefferus and his colleagues collect, investigate, and display anomalies at the intersection of enchantment and exempla; their default sensibility is eclecticism inflected with genuine wonder.
The final chapter of this beautifully produced and splendidly illustrated collection is devoted to perinatal health and dystocia, “unnatural delivery” (168), in early modern Sweden. For Tove Paulsson Holmbert the stillborn is “a promise unfulfilled,” a “familiar stranger” at the limen between life and death, pallid even as “the appearance of life still lingers on” (169). This deeply eloquent chapter explores obstetrical perception and practice, as well as signs of fetal vitality and decay and intrauterine intervention, via the work of physician and midwife Johan van Hoorn (d. 1724). One of Van Hoorn's treatises offers some 110 cases of dystocia, which collectively present the methods and techniques of emergency obstetric practice, the most difficult of which were births requiring procedures like podalic version (172–76). In these troublesome births, wise accoucheurs must “execute” the child to save the mother (179–80), all the while aware of mutual risk in “the fundamental instability of human existence in a fallen world” (181).
Instability certainly conditions exception, and exception “confirms the force of law” (Bacon, Works, 5.91), proves cases, hypotheses, theories. But is there a science of particulars, of exceptions, able to make normative claims about categories it impugns? These are legal, medical, and natural philosophical questions, and exception is but one star around which such questions, like this collection, orbit. Are we to assume that it was eclipsed by the “advent of the normal”?
