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Before beginning my PhD I worked as a curator at The British Library. One of my first assignments was to devise an exhibition for the Map Library. I had just a few days to choose a topic. I flipped hastily through books on the reference shelves, searching for maps from the age of European exploration, the bedrock of my expertise. What kept jumping off the pages were monsters: giants, cannibals, Amazons, and headless men (Fig. 1).
Figure 1. Map of Guiana in Americae pars VIII. Continens primo descriptionem trium itinerum nobilissimi et fortissimi equitis Francisci Draken [etc.] … (Frankfurt, 1599). Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University. J590 B915v GVL8.1 / 2-SIZE.
How and why European mapmakers populated maps with monstrous peoples became the story I’d brainstorm in the exhibition, draft in my PhD dissertation, and tell in my first book, Renaissance Ethnography and the Invention of the Human: New Worlds, Maps and Monsters.1 This book revealed that mapmakers made the idea of monstrous peoples, supposedly deformed by their environment, central to the category of “human.” In an age when scholars, missionaries, native peoples, and colonial officials debated whether New World peoples could or should be converted or enslaved, maps were instruments for comparing the effects on people of different climates. What I didn’t realize was that the monster archive would render my historical practice uncanny, making a monster out of me.
In the 2000s, two approaches to map history were locked in a duel. The traditional approach was to understand maps as neutral and objective, increasing in topographical accuracy over time. Pictures were merely space-fillers. The revisionist approach was to recognize that maps were made by people with agendas operating in particular settings that shaped what ended up on their maps. This was the “maps as politics” approach pioneered by the geographer J. B. Harley.2
By taking images of monstrous peoples on maps seriously I broke both molds. For traditionalists, engravings of headless men in Guiana or giants in Patagonia were what they called “myth,” “fantasy,” or “mere decoration”: cartographers supposedly added monsters to make their maps more appealing to buyers, or because they feared empty space. The “maps as politics” brigade offered a third explanation: monsters on European maps from the age of exploration were propaganda crafted to justify colonialism. For both factions, there was supposedly nothing more to say. I begged to differ.
For how can you know that these images have nothing to say before doing the research?
Monsters on maps resonated differently for me than they did for map experts. My response was shaped by reading Robert Darnton’s The Great Cat Massacre.3 In an essay about the grisly episode that gave the book its title, Darnton argued that past actions and beliefs that make the least sense today have the most to tell us about how different past mindsets (mentalités) were from those of the present. Rather than dismissing people of the past as ignorant or irrational for behaving in ways that might seem strange to us now — illustrating maps with monsters (in my sources) or gleefully bludgeoning cats (in Darnton’s) — historians should analyze these episodes on their own terms.
My training in the history of science had taught me that scientific knowledge doesn’t simply exist in the world waiting to be uncovered, like bugs under a log. How and why particular questions, techniques and explanations become acceptable have a history, one tied up in the messiness of people, power, and society. The path (whatever that means) of science isn’t one of inexorable improvement (another subjective category).
Figure 2. Pierre Desceliers, “Mappemonde,” 1550. Copyright British Library Board, Add. MS. 24065. Wikimedia Commons.
Running towards map monsters is what made my research both a novel intervention and supposedly marginal in academia. My willingness to understand historical actors on their own terms — to ask how mapmakers, artists, engravers, and printers evaluated travelers’ testimony, how and why they synthesized and extrapolated from sources, and what cultural and intellectual frameworks underpinned their reasoning — is what enabled the archive to make a monster out of this historian (Fig. 2).
Any classificatory system with discrete categories contains monsters: category-breakers that lie between or across categories. Societies invent positive, negative, and neutral monsters of the human sort. As I researched and wrote two books — Renaissance Ethnography and the Invention of the Human: New Worlds, Maps and Monsters and Humans: A Monstrous History — I realized that human monsters functioned to define three boundaries.4 One lies between human and “other stuff” like animals, gods, and machines. Terms like “cyborg” or “the missing link” denote this type of monster.The second type of boundary invents and polices social categories of race, nation, sex, and gender, categories that control people’s access to power and resources. The third type draws the parameters of normal for an individual’s body and behavior. Concepts like giant, freak, genius, or prodigy do this work.
“Human” has never been an unchanging, universal category. It’s always defined in relation to other things, from animals to space aliens, mapped in a taxonomy of beings in the universe. Stories about monsters are what keep categories separate from one another.
Academic disciplines and fields often have origin stories stapling them to particular types of evidence: art (art history), paper archives (history), “great works” (literary studies). Others operate on some mishmash of types of historical actor (mapmaker; scientist) and the traces and artifacts of their activities.
Figure 3. Title page. Sir Walter Ralegh, Brevis et admiranda descriptio regni Guianae (Nuremberg, 1599), title-page. Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University. J Hulsius pt. 5 1599 2.
But what of illustrations on maps? What of those monstrous men on maps who populate my first book, the headless Ewaipanoma of Guiana with faces in their chests, the Patagonian giants towering over behatted Europeans, and the cannibals at their barbecues? They’re not, at first glance, cartographic or scientific (to those who define science in nineteenth-century terms). They aren’t exactly great art: they are generally neither wildly original nor exquisitely crafted. Their captions are often formulaic or cribbed from travel accounts, geographies, and other maps: hardly great literature.
These images fell between the cracks of traditional disciplines. My sources broke categories: they were monstrous. Studying them meant integrating methods from several disciplines — and being marginalized by the more conservative practitioners in all of them.
Figure 4. Conjoined twins in Les œuvres d’Ambroise Paré … Divisees en trente livres … (Paris, 1628), 1011. Public Domain Mark, Wellcome Collection.
For years, I tracked monsters across arenas like science, medicine, exploration, and religion. Monster treatises like the one penned by the barber-surgeon Ambroise Paré in the late sixteenth century were stuffed with divine portents and atypical births (like conjoined twins) (Fig. 4). There were sulphurous pamphlets monstrifying religious opponents, like Philipp Melanchthon and Martin Luther’s screed against what they called the Papal Ass and the Monk Calf, memorably illustrated by Lucas Cranach the Elder (Fig. 5 & Fig. 6). And there were swashbuckling, monster-ridden adventure stories like Sir Walter Ralegh’s account of Guiana, with its headless men and Amazons (Fig. 3).5
Figures 5 & 6. Lucas Cranach, Of Two Vvoonderful Popish Monsters . . . [left] a Popish Asse… [right] a Monkish Calfe, woodcut, 1579 (first printed in a German pamphlet in 1523). STC 17797, Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, DC.
Though colleagues didn’t always know what to make of my work, my students were captivated by the likes of Antoinette Gonsalvus, a little girl with a hairy face, whose portraits are preserved in a French château, an Austrian curiosity cabinet, and books and albums devoted to monsters, animals, and even insects (Fig. 7).6
I had started my college career as a physics major (thanks to too much Star Trek). Later, trained as a historian of the premodern world, I daydreamed that, if aliens ever landed, it would be historians of exploration and cultural encounters — like me — who would be called in to direct first contact. But I hadn’t thought of my findings in the histories of monsters and encounters as potentially being for scientists.
In 2014, as I was finishing my first book on Renaissance monsters, I attended an astrobiology conference at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC, where I was on fellowship. In a panel about dealing with hostile extraterrestrials (including pathogens), all the scientists could talk about was weapons. But it seemed to me that preparing human society for that and other apocalypses involved working on our psychological readiness and learning how to pull together — and I said as much during the Q&A. The scientists were unimpressed; the panel chair dismissed my contribution outright. Yet the global response to the COVID-19 pandemic five years later made my point: science in the abstract can’t save humanity.
Figure 7. Lavinia Fontana, painting of Antoinette Gonsalvus, 1593. Wikimedia Commons.
I realized then that historians, even of events from half a millennium ago, had important perspectives to bring to science policy. Scientists had things to learn from historians if we figured out what they needed and wrote in the on-ramps to meet them in conversation. That’s why I wrote Humans: A Monstrous History, a multi-millennial history about category-breakers: for the scientists speculating about future encounters with hostile extraterrestrials, for the students who were captivated by Antoinette Gonsalvus, and for the historians who once studied science because they loved Star Trek.
By seeking to reach both science and history nerds in the same general-audience book, Humans: A Monstrous History breaks the parameters of “normal.” And by considering together sources that are often tracked into arenas associated with different levels of rigor, status, and seriousness, from ancient treatises on the natural world to Pixar movies, it blends high and pop culture, arenas that cross-fertilize each other where monster-making is concerned. And today’s monster-making has deep foundations. The ancient Greek naturalist Aristotle considered any creature that didn’t resemble their parents — particularly their father — to be a monster in the sense of being an error of nature, thus framing women as monsters albeit useful ones.
Humans: A Monstrous History is a history not of monsters but through them. It braids together history, science, culture, and social justice. Sometimes working across sources, disciplines, and periods is like being a semi-feral cat: you go adventuring and return home with treasure, only for your sometime hoomans to jump on chairs, shriek with horror, and reject your gift.
A historian who pays full attention to their sources can’t help but be transformed into a monster by the archive. So when next you read the work of a monster of a historian, know that you’ve met someone who is spelunking in archives to find stories buried under conventional categories.
The fate of this historian made monstrous by her archive is in your hands, dear reader. If these musings have entranced you enough to celebrate the possibilities of thinking monstrously in the sense of thinking capaciously, creatively, optimistically, then perhaps this essay made a monster out of you, too.
But fear not! A better future must be a Monstertopia, a place where people aren’t forced into boxes, mean little shapes that cannot contain us.
Let’s build that better future now.
- Surekha Davies, Renaissance Ethnography and the Invention of the Human: New Worlds, Maps and Monsters (Cambridge University Press, 2016).
- For a collection of his essays, see J. B. Harley, The New Nature of Maps: Essays in the History of Cartography, ed. Paul Laxton (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001).
- Robert Darton, The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (Penguin, 1984).
- Surekha Davies, Humans: A Monstrous History (University of California Press, 2025).
- Ambroise Paré, Des monstres tant terrestres que marins (Paris, 1573); Philipp Melanchthon and Martin Luther, Deuttung der zwo grewlichen. Figuren Bapstesels zu Freyburg en Meyssen funden, mit anzaygung des jungstentags (Wittenberg, 1523); Sir Walter Ralegh, The Discoverie of the Large, Rich, and bewtiful Empyre of Guiana (London, 1596).
- Davies, Humans, 29-37.