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made by a pair of conjoined twins who once lived there.
    By the sixteenth century, conjoined twins crop up in the monster-and-marvel anthologies with the monotonous regularity with which they now appear in British tabloids or the
New York Post
. Ambroise Paré described no fewer than thirteen, among them two girls joined back to back, two sisters joined at the forehead, two boys who shared a head and two infants who shared a heart. In 1560 Pierre Boaistuau gave an illuminated manuscript of his
Histoires prodigieuses
to Elizabeth I of England. Amid the plates of demonic creatures, wild men and fallen monarchs, is one devoted to two young women standing in a field on a single pair of legs, flaming red hair falling over their shoulders, looking very much like a pair of Botticelli Venuses who have somehow become entangled in each other.
    For the allegory-mongers, conjoined twins signified political union. Boaistuau notes that another pair of Italian conjoined twins were born on the very day that the warring city-states of Genoa and Venice had finally declared a truce – no coincidencethere. Montaigne, however, will have none of it. In his
Essays
(c.1580) he describes a pair of conjoined twins that he encountered as they were being carted about the French countryside by their parents. He considers the idea that the children’s joined torsos and multiple limbs might be a comment on the ability of the King to unify the various factions of his realm under the rule of law, but then rejects it. He continues,
‘Those whom we call monsters are not so with God, who in the immensity of his work seeth the infinite forms therein contained.’
Conjoined twins did not reflect God’s opinion about the course of earthly affairs. They were signs of His omnipotence.

    C ONJOINED TWINS: PARAPAGUS DICEPHALUS DIBRACHIUS . N ORMANDY . F ROM P IERRE B OAISTUAU 1560
Histoires prodigieuses.
    By the early eighteenth century, this humanist impulse – the same impulse that caused Sir Thomas Browne to write so tenderly about deformity – had arrived at its logical conclusion. In 1706 Joseph-Guichard Duverney, surgeon and anatomist at the Jardin du Roi in Paris, the very place where Ritta and Christina had been laid open, dissected another pair of twins who were joined at the hips. Impressed by the perfection of the join, Duverney concluded that they were without doubt a testament to the ‘the richness of the Mechanics of the Creator’, who had clearly designed them so. After all, since God was responsible for the form of the embryo, He must also be responsible if it all went wrong. Indeed, deformed infants were not really the result of embryos gone
wrong
– they were part of His plan. Bodies, said Duverney, were like clocks. To suppose that conjoined twins could fit together so nicely without God’s intervention was as absurd as supposing that you could take two long-case clocks, crash them into each other, and expect their parts to fuse into one harmonious and working whole.
    Others thought this was ridiculous. To be sure, they argued, God was ultimately responsible for the order of nature, but the notion that He had deliberately engineered defective eggs or sperm as a sort of creative flourish was absurd. If bodies were clocks, then there seemed to be a lot of clocks around that were hardly to the Clockmaker’s credit. Monsters were not evidence of divine design: they were just accidents.
    The conflict between these two radically different postitions, between deformity as divine design and deformity as accident, came to be known as
la querelle des monstres
– the quarrel of themonsters. It pitted French anatomists against one another for decades, the contenders trading blows in the
Mémoires de l’Académie Royale des Sciences
. More than theology was at stake. The quarrel was also a contest over two different views of how embryos are formed. Duverney and his followers were preformationists. They held that each
egg
(or, in some version of the