Maddalena, Francesca and Antonietta were the daughters of Petrus Gonzales (c.1537–1618). Along with their father and their brothers, Enrico and Orazio, they exhibited the symptoms of congenital hypertrichosis lanuginosa: much of their bodies, including the face, were covered with hair. Petrus Gonzales was a minor celebrity of his time, and resided at the court of Henri II of France. He was given a superior education, and many a visitor to King Henri’s court must have been astonished when the hairy ‘wild man’ addressed them in Latin. The Gonzales family became popular with painters, scientists, and lovers of curiosities throughout Europe. The family moved to Parma around 1590, under the protection of the dukes and cardinals there. At least one of the children of Petrus Gonzales brought the congenital hypertrichosis into the third generation.
In The Marvelous Hairy Girls, her biography of the Gonzales family, Merry Wiesner-Hanks, Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, uses them to explore Renaissance notions of the marvellous and the miraculous. She rightly comments on the family’s ‘double identity’: they were both ‘freaks of nature’ and regular residents at the courts of various magnates. We learn much of what the Gonzales family might have meant to others, but little of what they made of their own experiences. The scarcity of sources about them means that Professor Wiesner-Hanks needs to bolster this 248-page book with lengthy digressions on Renaissance court life, but this is quite neatly done and the specialist reader is kept interested throughout.
In the book’s discussion, Professor Wiesner-Hanks comments that the hairy Gonzales family soon disappeared from history, only to be re-discovered in the late twentieth century. This statement has the disadvantage of being quite untrue. In Victorian times, there was a vigorous discussion of some of the stranger by-products of Darwinism. One of them was the concept of an ‘atavism’: had a hairy child or a child born with a tail taken one step down the evolutionary ladder? Many ethnologists and medical scientists were busy gathering information about historical cases of congenital hypertrichosis, the Gonzales family included. Professor Wiesner-Hanks seems to have chosen to stay away from the medical and evolutionary aspects of her subjects, however: no reference is made to the nineteenth-century discussion of congenital hypertrichosis, or the contributions of Rudolf Virchow and other leading scientists of that time. The index, for example, does not include ‘Darwin, C.’ This considerably devalues the book for the historian of medicine.
The Marvelous Hairy Girls is a solid academic tome, of considerable value to specialist Renaissance historians. Its arcane subject and turgid writing makes it unlikely any person would read it for pleasure, however, and its discussion of the medical aspects of its subject is wholly lacking in depth.