ABSTRACT
In mid-sixteenth-century Italy, one could read marvellous novellas of a queen who gives birth to a pig, of a marchioness who gives birth to a snake, and of a princess accused of having given birth to three mongrel pups; these stories all appear in Giovanfrancesco Straparola's Le piacevoli notti, an extremely popular two-volume collection of novellas first printed in Venice in 1550 and 1553. Such tales of monstrous births clearly appealed to Straparola's readers, because Le piacevoli notti was reprinted more than twenty times in the sixty years following the princeps. These stories of bestial offspring distinguish Straparola's work from countless other collections of novellas published in the same period, while simultaneously likening it to the early modern scientific discourse on the monstrous. For example, in one of the novellas in his collection, Straparola narrates the story of an enchanted tuna that magically impregnates a haughty young princess at the behest of a foolish lad. A similar case of ichtyo-human hybridization can be found in Juan Huarte's Essame [sic] degl'ingegni degli huomini (1586), in which the Spanish physician relates what he held to be the true episode of a woman who, “andando a spasso lungo la riva del mare, un pesce uscì dell'acqua e impregnolla” (while she was wandering along the seashore, a fish left the water and impregnated her). 1 In another one of Straparola's novellas, a noble woman gives birth to mismatched twins: a normal child and a serpent. Serpent siblings, however, were not merely the fantastic inventions of storytellers used to entertain their audiences or readers. In his 1573 treatise Des monstres et prodiges, the French surgeon Ambroise Paré repeats Lycosthenes' 1494 account of a woman in Cracow who delivered a stillborn child “who had a live snake attached to its back.” 2 Similarly, in his book of secrets, the Neapolitan humanist Giambattista Della Porta purports that corrupt menstrual blood, when mixed with human seed in the womb, has been known to generate “rospi, lucerte, e altri simili animali” (toads, lizards, and other similar animals). 3 In the early modern collective consciousness, Straparola's favole, as he refers to his novellas, dwelt in closer proximity to scientific discourse than they do in our imagination. In our own day, stories of bestial births have been eliminated from scientific discourse and are most often relegated to those genres a majority of readers recognize as popular fictions: children's stories, horror films, and supermarket tabloids. For many of Straparola's contemporaries, however, the line dividing the fantastic tale from the scientific case history was both penetrable and ever shifting.
