ABSTRACT
The concept “monster” meant something very different in Europe at the beginning of the eighteenth century than it had in the fifteenth. In the eighteenth century, explanations of monstrosity based on natural observation increasingly rejected the moral and metaphysical explanations inherited from the fifteenth century. Monsters became naturalized in the sense of what Javier Moscoso has described as “attempts to explain away, or naturalize, the sentiment of wonder.” In this context, Fortunio Liceti’s De Monstris (1634-1665) has been praised as a worthy example of pre-Linnaean taxonomy. Nevertheless, some of the engravings in De Monstris show elements of grotesquery and other organizing principles that appear to fall outside of the genre of naturalization. This chapter focuses on those engravings and what the author describes as Liceti’s strategic use of lusus naturae (i.e., the play or sport of Nature) for purposes of sorting the temporal and spatial heterogeneity of the subjects of De Monstris.
