In the Ecclesia Militans, Johann Nas had condemned Lutheran sectarianism with its ‘many heads, mouths and tongues’, and added a marginal note elsewhere in his broadsheet to the same effect: ‘however many heads, so many meanings’. He was inspired by a two-headed man and by the seven-headed beast of the apocalypse, respectively; figures that represented the dreadful multiplicity that Nas sought to interpret and condemn. Yet in his 1495 broadsheet on the Worms twins, joined at the forehead, Sebastian Brant had observed that ‘all good things come from the head’. The comment was aimed at Emperor Maximilian I, and intended to flatter him as the ‘head’ of the Holy Roman Empire. By 1584, however, Christoph Irenaeus included an extended discussion of the meaning of multiple heads in his unillustrated but highly descriptive De monstris (‘On Monsters’), and concluded that they always signified unhappy things: ‘Such two- or many-headed monsters indicate division and discord in the spiritual and worldly orders’.

By the close of the sixteenth century, the graphically striking representation of abnormal heads remained a constant theme in publications on monstrous births, but their meaning was almost entirely negative, and generally framed within an apocalyptic world view. A child might have multiple heads, recalling for the viewer and reader the seven-headed beast of the Apocalypse. It might have a dramatically deformed single head with a mouth that seemed to cry out some warning, or it might even have more extended, abnormal, prophetic powers of speech. These new publications reached for novelty, and readers and viewers were presented with increasingly extraordinary phenomena in textual and visual form. Rather than tracing the continuing fortunes of iconic monstrous births like the Monk Calf, Papal Ass or monster of Krakow – although they continued to appear in print – this chapter will look at a series of new cases from the last decades of the sixteenth century.