The Marvelous Hairy Girls: The Gonzales Sisters and Their Worlds

New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009. First Edition. Hardcover. Fine/near fine. First Edition. Hardcover. First edition, with full number line indicating first printing. 8 3/4" X 5 3/4". xiii, 248pp. A touch of shelfwear to pictorial dust jacket, else fine. Bound in full black cloth with spine lettered in gilt. Binding is firm, tight, and sound. Pages are clean, bright, and unmarked. A highly presentable first printing of this history of the Gonzales girls, a triad of sixteenth-century sisters genetically predisposed to unusual hirsutism who found popularity among the painters, scientists, and lovers of curiosities throughout Europe.

ABOUT THIS BOOK:
This book tells the extraordinary story of three sixteenth-century sisters who, along with their father and brothers, were afflicted with an extremely rare genetic condition that made them unusually hairy. Amazingly, the Gonzales sisters were not mocked or shunned, but were welcomed in the courts of Europe, spending much of their lives among nobles, musicians, and artists. Their double identity as humans and beasts made them intriguing, and the girls and their father were the subjects not only of medical investigations but also of a considerable number of portraits, some of which still hang in European castles today.

Using the Gonzales family as a lens, historian Merry Wiesner-Hanks examines their varied and wondrous times. The story of this family connects with every important change of their era-political and religious violence, colonial conquest, new forms of scholarship and science-and also provides insights into the complex relationships between beastliness, monstrosity, and gender in early modern life. (publisher).