They stare enigmatically from portraits, furry-faced but in Renaissance finery, looking like Baroque werewolves. They were the Gonzales women, afflicted with a rare hirsute condition and displayed in the courts of 16th-century Europe. UW-Milwaukee history professor Merry Wiesner-Hanks writes not so much about the Gonzales family (on which little documentation exists) but the imaginative world they inhabited. The Marvelous Hairy Girls investigates European ideas on the distinctions between human and animal and men and women in an age when women were deemed as either saintly or monstrous, when werewolves and wildmen stalked the forest of the mind and genetic mutations were signs from Godand employed as propaganda by rival Catholics and Protestants. It's an enjoyable read, packed with fascinating bits. Who knew that canaries were named for the Canary Islands, so called because canines overran the islands?
The Marvelous Hairy Girls: The Gonzales Sisters and Their Worlds (Yale University Press), by Merry Wiesner-Hanks
Book Review
