The most notorious and still best-known monstrous births of the early modern period are two creatures known as the Papal Ass and Monk Calf. Their images are emblematic of the printed propaganda wars of the Reformation. The Papal Ass, washed up on the banks of the Tiber in Rome in 1496, and the Monk Calf, born in Freiberg in 1522, were polemically analysed in a 1523 pamphlet written by Martin Luther and Philipp Melanchthon. Monstrous births could be viewed in positive and sympathetic terms, as the previous chapters have demonstrated. Yet this 1523 pamphlet by the two most important figures of the Lutheran Reformation forms a decisive shift in attitude, in which interpretation and representation became not only more polemical – and particularly anti-papal – but took on a notably apocalyptic aspect. This chapter therefore shifts in approach from the previous chapters, which surveyed many different cases, and instead takes a very close look at one single pamphlet, its broader publication context in Reformation thought, and its afterlife in the following decades.

Natural Prodigies in the Early Lutheran Reformation

In a commentary on Genesis 30, Luther discussed examples of women who had been affected by a fright or other external stimuli during pregnancy and consequently gave birth to deformed children. One woman gave birth to a child with a face like a corpse after she had seen a corpse; others transferred ‘bloody spots’ (presumably birthmarks) to their unborn children when they touched those parts of their own bodies after being suddenly frightened. Most strikingly, one woman gave birth to a dormouse: