Monster. De Quadrupedibus. Page 978 1551 - 1587

This woodcut of a monster comes from Conrad Gesner's encyclopedia of animals, published in Zurich in the mid-16th century. Gesner was a polymath whose work embodies the intersection of humanist scholarship and the natural sciences during the Renaissance. The image of the monster, part human and part animal, tells us about the cultural imagination of the time. In a period marked by exploration and encounters with new worlds, monsters represented the limits of human knowledge and the anxieties surrounding the unknown. But this image also appears within a specific institutional context, a scholarly project attempting to classify and understand the natural world. As historians, we can look to texts, scientific treatises, and travelogues to better understand the cultural significance of this image. The monster becomes a window into a world grappling with the boundaries between the natural and the unnatural, the known and the unknown.