In the 1490s, Basel-based author Sebastian Brant published a series of works intended to gain the praise of fellow humanists, the interest of a much wider public audience and the political patronage of Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I. This chapter examines how a group of broadsheets by Brant, published in both German and Latin and illustrated with vigorous woodcuts, gave a new place in public life to singular, local monstrous births. It will also examine the ways in which these monstrous births were perceived as quite distinct from the exotic monstrous races that had been the most frequently represented form of monstrous body in medieval culture. Sebastian Brant utilized short publications to promote his interpretations of monstrous births. Broadsheets and pamphlets, with their potential to reach large audiences, were at a critical early stage of development during this period. While short publications aimed at wide audiences had not yet reached the dramatic explosion in numbers of the early Reformation, writers like Brant were working together with publishers to create products with a wide appeal. These were publications that combined text and image in dynamic ways to inform the public, literate and illiterate alike, about current events. Their development coincided with the early stirrings of a flourishing and consciously self-confident period in German art, especially graphic art. These broadsheets incorporate illustrations that range from crude but graphically dynamic to technically and conceptually sophisticated. They testify to the range of possible approaches during this period of innovation.

The late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries occupy a distinctive point at the close of the medieval period and prior to the dramatic changes set in motion by the Reformation. As printing technologies became increasingly accessible, the subsequent Reformation and post-Reformation periods saw a larger number of broadsheets and pamphlets reporting monstrous births, while from the middle of the sixteenth century a new wave of compendium-style books also began to appear.