Monstrous births were a source of fascination and fear in early modern Europe. In the first half of the sixteenth century they were of particular importance in the German-speaking territories of the Holy Roman Empire that became caught up in religious conflict, the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation. During this period intellectual and theological debates, widely circulated publications and visual culture reflected a preoccupation with phenomena that were simultaneously natural and unnatural. These ranged from showers of blood to strange comets and included the topic of this book: monstrous births. One of the most dramatic and iconic publications to report such wonders may well be a 1578 German-language broadsheet from Strasbourg. It informs the reader and viewer about the separate births in Italy of a seven-headed child and a horned child in January 1578 (Fig. I.1). The child with seven heads had been born in Evorizo (Eusrigo), in the vicinity of Milan, to a woman of good repute in the community. The other child, with four horns and a kind of loose skin cap, was born in Piedmont. How might people at the time have viewed these children? The seven-headed child would very likely have recalled for viewers the seven-headed beast of the Apocalypse, with the child's satyr-like legs adding an additional demonic element. For those people disposed to interpret the scene along apocalyptic lines, the child on the left-hand side of the image could also easily be associated with the second beast of the Apocalypse, marked by the horns on its head.

Not only are these children themselves both demonic and apocalyptic in appearance, but they are shown here in the context of a destructive storm and flood of biblical proportions. The town is clearly identified in the text as the ‘town of Horb on the [river] Neckar’. That is, this is a German town that lies in ruins behind the two Italian monstrous births. The broadsheet text further reports that Horb was the site of a great flood and storm on 15 May 1578; events witnessed by the anonymous author of the broadsheet.