In class, we started to talk about monstrous births. I was surprised to see that most of these incidents, it wasn’t blamed on the sins of the parents. It was God’s message to inform the town that they all have been sinning or it’s the mother’s thoughts that transforms the child. The mother could be so interested in fashion that the baby will have a body that takes on the fashion such as a baby having a neck that looks like ruffs.
I find all this interesting because I just finished a book Philippa Gregory called The Other Boleyn Girl. This book is a fictional history on Anne and Mary Boleyn. Anne was married to King Henry VIII but Mary Boleyn, her younger sister, was actually one of King Henry’s mistresses and bore him two children in the book. Anne married King Henry a couple of years later but could not bear him a child. Bearing a son was one of the duties of a queen. Anne had many miscarriages and it was rumored that Anne couldn’t bear a child because she was sinning with her brother George and a couple of the other loyalist. One of these miscarriages actually was a monstrous birth and it was hinted that George and Anne actually had an incestuous affair. This baby had a flared back, hunched, just a horrid looking baby and the midwife knew immediately that Anne sinned as no good person would give birth to a monster.
This contradicts everything we talked about in class. Everyone knew that the mother sinned and that it was a message from God saying that Anne sinned but not a message to warn all of England that they are ALL sinning. It was blamed on the mother that this child was born this way and not because Anne thought about anything. It could be because Anne wanted to have a child so bad that this happened but that wouldn’t make too much sense. Why would you think about giving birth to a monstrous baby? The only explanation was that Anne ultimately sinned with her brother that created this monstrous baby.
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I felt the same way when I read those pamphlets. I expected them to be sending mothers to the stake, when in fact the writers went out of their way to assure audiences of the parents' innocence. Maybe we overestimate the barbaric nature of earlier cultures. After all, the pamphlets we read were written for the common people, and the commoners that made up a certain village would likely have been a rather closely-knit little bunch, as they would have had to depend upon one another for various goods and services (smithing, tanning, butchering, etc.).
As far as I remember, the only pamphlet that specifically accused the mother was "A Declaration of a Strange and Wonderful Monster," where the baby was born headless after the mother's announcement that she would rather bear a child with no head than a "roundhead." And she was a gentlewoman, not a commoner. Anne, too, was noble. Maybe people were more likely to shoot accusations at noblewomen who bore monstrous children than at commoners "guilty" of the same. To peasants, it would give them a reason to look down on their superiors, and to fellow nobles, it would aid their own attempts to claim authority over one another. But this is just a random thought.
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