ABSTRACT
Francis Bacon, in his treatise De dignitate et Augmentis scientiarum, grapples with the categorization of monsters, and determines that the monstrous is nature "put out of her course". De Bry's collection of accounts of the discovery and conquest of this new land forced Europeans to confront and account for a world that evaded the careful classifications that defined normalcy, and so the unfamiliar was often reduced to the category of monster. One could say that the European's discovery of America took place at a "fortuitous" time in the European imagination. Alchemy offered early modern Europeans a suppressed epistemology designed to deal with difference. Eroding early modern European systems of classification and offering more fluid models both threatened and renewed the controlling mindset of the age. Europeans were shaped and ruled by thinking that was at once self-protective and destructive, thinking that required its proliferation for its survival.
