650 Ulisse Aldrovandi

# TWO-BODIED MONSTERS formed from human and animal fetuses.

BEFORE we descend to recording the history of two-bodied animal monsters, we considered it necessary to reveal something of monsters sharing both natures. This allows us to transition from one extreme to the other through a middle ground—namely, from two-bodied human monsters to similarly two-bodied animal monsters, by way of those that share both natures.

For at the beginning of this eleventh chapter, it was noted that two-bodied monsters should be understood in three ways: first as human, then as animal, and finally as those composed of partly human and partly animal fetuses. This latter group is further divided into two types. Some understand a "two-bodied monster sharing the nature of man and beast" as something with a dual nature in a single body, such as that half-human, half-dog offspring said to have been born in Rome in the year 1493. It was born of a young virgin as a portentous sign of the outrages that were to follow, as shown in Figure I. However, we are not discussing such monsters at present, as they were treated earlier in the chapter on monstrous feet.

But in this context, by "monsters sharing human and animal nature," we mean those joined together not only from a dual nature but also from two distinct bodies of different species, as we might say with the Poet: "They can be of dual nature and twin body."

One monster of this kind was born in the year 854, near the end of the reign of Emperor Lothair, who was Duke of Saxony. It was born to a certain woman in the form of both a man and a dog; the two bodies were very tightly fused at the spine, and the Emperor’s death followed the birth of this monster.

Similarly, in the year 1126, a common woman in Albania gave birth to a two-bodied monster. One face was human, with its other parts in proportion to that face, while the other was canine, with limbs corresponding to the dog's head. The spines of both fetuses were fused, as presented before your eyes in Figure II.

It is, moreover, worthy of note and the greatest wonder—according to the thought of Arnaud Sorbin—that at the time this monster fused from dog and man appeared in Albania, the wretched city of Montauban in Aquitaine was biting neighboring cities with war and betrayals. Infected by the errors of the Albigensians, they were driven by much the same madness that today plagues nearly all nearby places with "canine bites."

For this reason, Sorbin related that their misery could not be more clearly signified: though they appeared as men in form, professing abstinence in many things, behind their backs they were the most biting of dogs—impudent, blasphemous, and sacrilegious—following the error and impiety of the Calvinists. Indeed, priests were slaughtered everywhere by the heretics, God’s sacred temples were plundered, cities were seized through treachery, and finally, Catholic men walked about afflicted by grief and wasting away. Some deplored the loss of their wealth, others the oppression of their homeland and the wretched calamity of that era. At last, everything was filled with tears and sighs; such was the impious ferocity of heretical depravity. The birth of the monster in Albania served as a premonition that this would come to pass.