THE FISHERTON MONSTER: SCIENCE, PROVIDENCE, AND POLITICS IN EARLY RESTORATION ENGLAND

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis article reconsiders the significance of an episode of monstrous birth in Fisherton Anger, Wiltshire, in 1664. Tracing the influence of natural philosophical, spiritual, and providential impulses in extant accounts of the Fisherton birth, it suggests that in order wholly to comprehend this material it is necessary to move beyond debates about the ‘rise of science’. It therefore explores the contemporary claims made about the Fisherton monster against the backdrop of the aftermath of the Civil Wars and Interregnum, suggesting that the rampant politicization of monstrosity after the outbreak of war in 1642 provides the key to understanding the emphasis on different kinds of natural, spiritual, and moral truth in accounts of physiological abnormality after 1660. A case-study of early Restoration efforts to negotiate the instability of past events, this article further argues that the impulse to forget which underpinned the Indemnity and Oblivion Act (1660) found different expression elsewhere in the form of censorship and beyond the political sphere in the field of natural philosophy. Considered in light of this early Restoration culture of amnesia, the Fisherton monster embodies a series of attempts to forget the passions of a turbulent political past.