This article analyzes three analogies based on monstrous anomaly described in late medieval music theory treatises. Jacques of Liège’s 14th-century diatribe against the proponents of abnormal notational values such as larga (or duplex longa) invoked multicephalic or multi-limbed creatures, possibly recalling the Hydra of Lerna, Cerberus, or Medusa Gorgona. Fifteenth-century music theorist Ugolino of Orvieto’s analysis of the eight ecclesiastical modes posited that the occurrence of structural anomalies within interval species engendered a monstrous, composite animal: Chimera. The third example, still from Ugolino, introduces a surgically “manufactured,” anthropomorphic monster. Its origin, traceable to actual 14th- and 15th-century surgical practice, suggests Ugolino’s familiarity with contemporary surgical writings such as Guy de Chauliac’s Chyrurgia magna. Furthermore, the monster also suggests Ugolino’s actual connection with Michele Savonarola, physician to both Borso and Lionello d’Este at the court of Ferrara, and believed to have performed one of the two types of surgery present in Ugolino’s analogy. [*]
[*] Earlier versions of this article were presented at the Seventeenth Interdisciplinary Conference of the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, University of Arizona at Tempe, February 2011; and the Annual Conference of the UK Art Historians, University of Warwick, April 2011. I would like to thank Richard Aspin at the Rare Books and Manuscripts Division, the Wellcome Library for the History of Medicine, London for providing access to the medical manuscripts, incunabula, and early books referred to in the second section of this article.
