In 1559 the French humanist Pierre Boaistuau arrived at the English court with a pitch for the newly crowned Elizabeth I: a lavish illuminated catalogue of the world’s marvels and monstrosities, prepared so an English printer could turn it into a book. He had pedigree — his Histoires tragiques (1559) would supply the source Shakespeare later turned into Romeo and Juliet.
The result, Histoires prodigieuses, sits halfway between a medieval bestiary and a scientific treatise on birth defects:
- 44 chapters drawing on the Bible, classical philosophy, folktales, and gossip
- Opens with the Devil himself — Delphi’s oracle, then tricking the people of Calicut into worship, in images lifted from Jörg Breu the Elder’s 1515 woodcuts of misread Hindu temples
- Wonders closer to home: the “horrible, deformed, terrible” hairy Monster of Cracow, a four-armed child born the day Venice and Genoa made peace, a Frenchman with another man growing out of his stomach
- Causes ran from divine judgment to maternal imagination — a hairy girl shown to Emperor Charles IV was blamed on her mother staring at a fur-clad statue of Saint John during conception
Scholars read a Reformation subtext: the Devil’s three-tiered crown as a jab at the papacy, with incense burners and vestments that look more Catholic than pagan (in the 1560 French printing, the figures were recast as Ottomans).
Elizabeth never endorsed the book — chapters on the deaths and afflictions of kings made an awkward gift for a twenty-six-year-old queen. Boaistuau published in Paris in 1560 anyway; it was an instant hit, reissued nine times over the next thirty-five years. “She didn’t shoot the messenger, but she didn’t help him get published, either.”
The manuscript survives at the Wellcome Collection, its images in the public domain — a great Renaissance cabinet of curiosities pitched to a queen and politely declined.