In 1559, a French humanist named Pierre Boaistuau arrived in England. His goal was to win an endorsement from the recently crowned Elizabeth I of England for his catalogue of the marvels, wonders, and monstrosities of the world. He had reason to be confident: Boaistuau was fresh off the success of his Théâtre du monde (1588), and had just published his Histoires tragiques (1559), the third story of which would, some thirty-five years later, become the source for Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. To win the queen over, he had prepared a lavish illuminated manuscript, from which an English publisher would then be able to create a printed version.

Divided into forty-four chapters, Boaistuau’s Histoires prodigieuses is something between a medieval bestiary and a scientific treatise on birth defects. His sources were wide: the Bible, Greek and Roman philosophy, contemporary literature, folktales, and salacious gossip. This heady mix is on display from the beginning — his first wonder is the Devil himself (7r).

Beelzebub has, Boaistuau claims, been incarnated on earth in two places. First he ruled over the Temple of Apollo in Delphi, where he pretended to give oracles in exchange for the sacrifices of virgins. In Boaistuau’s own time, however, the Devil was even more shameless: he had revealed himself to the good people of Calicut (now Kozhikode, in southwest India), whom he had tricked into treating him like a god. For this intelligence, Boaistuau cites Ludovico di Varthema, a Bolognese merchant who had travelled to Calicut in 1505. Di Varthema had seen (and misinterpreted) some Hindu temples, and his travel account had been illustrated in a 1515 German edition with woodcuts by Jörg Breu the Elder (1475–1537). Breu’s chicken-footed depiction of the Hindu god (35r) was a clear source of inspiration for Boaistuau’s own illustration. The latter went further, however, adding the monstrous birth of a smaller demon emerging from between the Devil’s thighs.

Sixteenth-century French and English writers were inheritors of a long tradition of myth-making about the monsters that live at the edges of the world — on the spectacular Hereford Mappa Mundi (ca. 1300), sciapods linger near the Ganges Delta — but Susanne Chadbourne argues that Boaistuau was fighting battles much closer to home. The devil’s three-tiered crown was a warning about the evils of popery; indeed, the European dress and incense burners of the figures in Boaistuau’s manuscript make them look more Catholic than anything else. (In the 1560 French printing, they would be made into Ottomans.)

Indeed, the Far East is not the only place where wonders can be found in Histoires prodigieuses: Kraków is the hometown of the “horrible, deformed, terrible” hairy child with a cow’s face, horns, monkey’s-head nipples, and dog’s-head joints (29v). A child with four arms and four legs was born in Italy on the day that the Venetians and Genoese decided to make peace (68v). It is in France itself that a man was born who had another man sticking straight out of his stomach (137v).

The cause of all of these wonders is harder to explain, and Boaistuau plumbs both the classical and ecclesiastical writers for an answer. He remains not entirely convinced by the Biblical accusations that it is, in general, the fault of loose women having sex on their periods, but like many of his contemporaries, he suggests that it might have to do with a bit of distraction on their part. The hairy girl who was presented to the Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV (23v) — “completely furry like a bear” — was the result of her mother staring too intently, during conception, at a statue of Saint John wearing an animal skin. The smaller, Black child supposedly represents another danger of intrusive thoughts of this kind.

Despite the opening ode to Her Majesty, Elizabeth seems not to have endorsed the text, since it did not debut in printed form in England. Boaistuau instead had it published in Paris the following year, where it was immediately popular. Over the next thirty-five years, it would be reissued nine times. She had missed her chance at helping Boaistuau reach the English public, but one gets the sense that Boaistuau could have been slightly savvier. A dedication and a poem are all well and good, but chapters three and four, on the deaths and afflictions of kings, were unlikely to be appealing to the monarch. She might have been reassured that a medieval attempt to burn an English queen alive ended in failure (134v), but did twenty-six-year-old Elizabeth really want to hear about the death of Mempricius, a legendary Welsh (Boaistuau calls him English) king who was torn into pieces by wolves? Looking at the image of the once-mighty King of Babylon (20v), did the young Elizabeth really want to meditate on passages like the following?

What a mirror! what an example! what a show! What a wonder, for those who command, to see he who had been sumptuously served delicate meats, now partake in the desert of the food of beasts, and banquet with them! [To see] he who was once clothed in purple and frilled with precious jewels brought so low by the powerful hand of God, that he is now only covered with the hair that is the adornment of beasts!

She didn’t shoot the messenger, but she didn’t help him get published, either.