#eebo

What and who is Eebo?

The historie of serpents. Or, The second booke of liuing creatures wherein is contained their diuine, naturall, and morall descriptions, with their liuely figures, names, conditions, kindes and natures of all venemous beasts: with their seuerall poysons and antidotes; their deepe hatred to mankind, and the wonderfull worke of God in their creation, and destruction. Necessary and profitable to all sorts of men: collected out of diuine scriptures, fathers, phylosophers, physitians, and poets: amplified with sundry accidentall histories, hierogliphicks, epigrams, emblems, and aenigmaticall obseruations. By Edvvard Topsell.

Since it’s Halloween, I’m teaching a curious little pamphlet entitled Strange Newes from Scotland OR, A strange Relation of a terrible and prodigious Monster... (1647)

Initially I popped onto EEBO to see if I could find a copy of the more famous The Newes from Scotland, which details the Berwicke Witch Trials and King James VI/I’s adventures with them. (By the by, there doesn’t seem to be a scanned copy of that pamphlet available! Ack!) Instead I found this curious little treatise about a monster born near Edinburgh in September 1647.

The pamphlet begins:

There “was borne a Child, or rather a Monster, (I think Laerna nor AEgyptian Nyle ever produced the like) with two heads, growing severally, somewhat distant one from the other, bearing the similitude of man and woman, the one face being all over-growne with long haire, the other more smooth & more...

...effeminate, the eares of both long, (like as the Poets fancie Mydas his eares, who was Judge between Pan and Apollo) standing bold upright, in shape and length much like unto an Asses; the Eyes standing in the middest of the Fore-head (they having but one a piece) cannot unfitly bee paralelled with that horned Monster Polyphemus, spoken of by Homer, which Ulysses extinguisht the sight of, by thrusting a Fire-brand into the Eye) they being bigge and round, like unto Sawcers: His Body shap’d or rather having no shape) round like the truncke of a Tree or Barrell: The Neckes to support his horned structure (I meane the Heads) were strong, sinewie and short, like to a strong neckt Bull: The Armes had their growthes from severall places; being of great dimensions, but very small, having annexed to their wrists great Tallons, like to a Griffins. From the Secret parts (which shewed it to bee both Male and Female) downewards, all hairie, like your Satyres, or Sylvane Gods: The Legges long and cloven, like an Oxes Foot, and out of the knees, or upper part of the legges, brancht out hands, shap’d and coloured like a Monkeys: In short, all the parts about it were monstrous and ill-shapen...”

The baby-creature goes on to inform the onlookers “I am thus deformed for the sinnes of my Parents” and then its mother confesses her sins as a warning to those others around her... 

“But before shee could put a Period to her speech, Death put an Exit to her dayes.” 

(What a great line!)

Curiously, the pamphlet doesn’t report what happened to the baby-monster.