Of Monkey Girls and a Hog-Faced Gentlewoman: Marvel in Fairy Tales, Fairgrounds, and Cabinets of Curiosities

Abstract

In sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe, hairy girls made medical, court, fairy-tale, and fairground fame simultaneously. Tiny nut boots decorated fairy feet in a tale by d'Aulnoy as well as the shelves of an English cabinet of curiosities. Ballads borrowed the structure of the folktale and sold a pig-faced girl like a fairy-tale princess. The article looks at cross-disciplinary intersections where anomalous bodies became tellable, collectible, and commercial. It locates the marvel of monkey girls and a hog-faced gentlewoman within the strategies of knowledge, the cultural practices of display, and the pleasures of tale-telling that marked early modern Europe.