The Marvelous Hairy Girls: The Gonzales Sisters and Their Worlds [Hardcover]

On the cover of the new book by historian Merry Wiesner-Hanks is the portrait of a young girl dressed in Renaissance finery, an elaborate and lacy dress. She smiles slightly and looks directly at the viewer with big brown eyes. She has flowers in her hair. But she has hair not only at the top of her head, but all over her forehead, cheeks, and chin. She is Antonietta Gonzales, and she is one of the main characters in _The Marvelous Hairy Girls_ (Yale University Press), the story of a family from the sixteenth century which had what doctors would now call _hypertrichosis universalis_, a rare mutation that causes excessive hairiness. What the doctors of her own time made of her, and courtiers, philosophers, priests, and the public besides, is the story here. There are many portraits of Antonietta and her family, but they didn't leave us written records, and there are only a few written accounts by others. Wiesner-Hanks's book, therefore, is not even close to a biography, but is rather a good excuse to look at the superstitions, religious beliefs, court procedures, and medical thinking of that distant age.

The Gonzales family represent a sizable chunk of the fewer than fifty documented cases of their genetic condition. The father was Petrus, born in the 1530s, and sent to court in Paris because of his curiosity value. Henry II made him a court figure by educating him. We don't know exactly what Henry's motives were, nor what other courtiers thought of Petrus. Perhaps they found it funny that a beast could be dressed up in fancy clothing and spout Latin. Duke William V of Bavaria wrote his sister, "... he is not wild, as one would think. The man is actually a refined and courteous fellow, but just shaggy." When Petrus grew up, he married. His bride was a Parisian woman who had no physical abnormality, and was beautiful. Paintings show a contented couple, along with the eventual progeny. One son had normal hair, and three other sons had their father's hair, as did daughters Maddalena, Francesca, and Antonietta. The family moved to Parma around 1590, under the protection of dukes and cardinals there, but were still living curiosities. There is no indication that the family was different from anyone else except for hair, and it seems that they may have been curiosities but they were not outcasts. The church was forever trying to impose a moral meaning on such oddities and monsters, and in the sixteenth century there was an opinion that monstrosities were increasing. A monstrous child might be just the punishment its sinful unwedded parents deserved, but was also a warning to all sinners to knock off all that sinning. Catholics tended to interpret monsters as being warnings of how heretical those Protestants were, and Protestants thought the monsters were warnings of how rapidly the end of the world was approaching. It is refreshing to read the words of the physician Felix Platter, one of the doctors who examined the Gonzales children. Unlike other physicians and learned men, he described what he saw, and he did not try to explain why the children had so much hair (indeed, he brings up other peoples' explanations only to dismiss them). For him, everyone had hair and these children simply had an excess; it was not a matter in which one could search for an instructive moral.

Relatively little of this book is specifically about the Gonzales family. Wiesner-Hanks has used them to take a look at a huge number of related subjects, and she always has another surprising fact to tell us about the court protocols, midwifery, gender politics, secret marriages, the history of the people of the Canary Islands, the popular interpretation of wonders and monsters, and much more. It was a strange time, but the story of this hirsute family is an optimistic one. They seem to have been well treated, even if they were specimens. Those who valued them were collectors of curiosities, the forerunners of the museum curators and natural historians of future generations. It may not be that the hairy girls were a necessary step on our way to a better scientific understanding of the world, but this entertaining book shows that they had a place in it.

This is a great story, but the author writes very early on that there simply was not that much information on the "Hairy Girls", then proceeds to write more about society at that time. I really wish there was more passion in the style of writing, it was rather dry.