Birthing Fake Monsters in Early Modern Germany

The following are excerpts from Alison Rowlands, "Monstrous Deception: Midwifery, Fraud, and Gender in Early Modern Rothenburg ob der Tauber" in Gender in Early Modern History, ed. Ulinka Rublack. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002: 71-101:

"Examples of the creatures it was thought possible a woman could give birth to in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries included a frog, a calf, a lobster and a monkey."

"[The midwife] referred to an unmarried woman from the city of Esslingen who had managed to convince people that her stomach was full of snakes, with the implication that she too had received gifts from onlookers as a result of her mysterious condition"
--
"The plan worked like this: Seitterin's dog had recently given birth to puppies, one of which had died and partially decomposed. Mullerin took its body home with her, fashioned it into something Seitterin later described as 'in the likelness of a little pig', then smuggled it back into Seitterin's room hidden in her basket. She instructed Seitterin to hold the manufactured monstrosity between her legs in front of the opening to her vagina and pretend to be in the throes of childbirth. She was them to summon her female neighbours and, on their arrival, to let the monstrosity fall from between her legs so that they would assume she had just given birth to it"
...
"Mullerin seems to have just pulled the head off the already half-decomposed puppy for the first birth, and skinned, disembowelled and chopped the heads off the next two puppies for births two and three."


Gross! And so wrong!