Ambroise Paré, born in France around 1510, was chief surgeon to both Charles IX and Henri III. In one of the first attempts to explain birth defects, Paré produced On Monsters and Marvels, an illustrated encyclopedia of curiosities, of monstrous human and animal births, bizarre beasts, and natural phenomena. Janice Pallister's acclaimed English translation offers a glimpse of the natural world as seen by an extraordinary Renaissance natural philosopher.

""The marvelous follows us always" - or so the Italian philosopher Francesco Patrizi asserted in 1587. The essays in this book collectively make the case that this assertion could be an epigraph for the Renaissance. For Wonder was a concept absolutely central to the early modern period. Encompassing both inquiry and astonishment, "wonder" indeed followed the Renaissance everywhere - into redefinitions of the mind, the body, art, literature, the known world. Often called the age of discovery, the Renaissance should also be seen as the age of the marvelous." "However, defining just what la maraviglia would have meant for Patrizi and his age is no small task." "This volume, then, seeks to explore early modern views of wonder and the marvelous by revealing the complexity of la maraviglia in the Renaissance."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

"Undergraduate and graduate courses on monsters are becoming widespread as many disciplines use monsters to think about what it means to be human. To date no source collection on the literature of the monstrous exists, and this first volume of two offers the seminal essays on monster theory. The texts exemplify their period or genre, and have proved influential as exemplars for further cultural appropriations. Each work is preceded by a critical introduction, reading questions, notes and further reading - all valuable introductory material for students. Accompanied by a second volume of primary source material and an instructor's website, this text will prove essential reading for students and scholars alike."--Bloomsbury Publishing.

Ages 9 to 12 years. A must-have for any home or school library, this fascinating book highlights 30 of the most fascinating creatures in the sea. The beautiful full-colour photographs and interesting descriptions highlighting the design features of each creature make this book a must read.

In his Book of Marvels and Travels, Sir John Mandeville describes a journey from Europe to Jerusalem and on into Asia, and the many wonderful and monstrous peoples and practices in the East. A captivating blend of fact and fantasy, Mandeville's Book is newly translated in an edition that brings us closer to Mandeville's worldview.

Winner of the 2022 Eisner Award for Best Comics-Related Book The first-ever full reckoning with Marvel Comics’ interconnected, half-million-page story, a revelatory guide to the “epic of epics”—and to the past sixty years of American culture—from a beloved authority on the subject who read all 27,000+ Marvel superhero comics and lived to tell the tale “Brilliant, eccentric, moving and wholly wonderful. . . . Wolk proves to be the perfect guide for this type of adventure: nimble, learned, funny and sincere. . . . All of the Marvels is magnificently marvelous. Wolk’s work will invite many more alliterative superlatives. It deserves them all.” —Junot Díaz, New York Times Book Review The superhero comic books that Marvel Comics has published since 1961 are, as Douglas Wolk notes, the longest continuous, self-contained work of fiction ever created: over half a million pages to date, and still growing. The Marvel story is a gigantic mountain smack in the middle of contemporary culture. Thousands of writers and artists have contributed to it. Everyone recognizes its protagonists: Spider-Man, the Avengers, the X-Men. Eighteen of the hundred highest-grossing movies of all time are based on parts of it. Yet not even the people telling the story have read the whole thing—nobody’s supposed to. So, of course, that’s what Wolk did: he read all 27,000+ comics that make up the Marvel Universe thus far, from Alpha Flight to Omega the Unknown. And then he made sense of it—seeing into the ever-expanding story, in its parts and as a whole, and seeing through it, as a prism through which to view the landscape of American culture. In Wolk’s hands, the mammoth Marvel narrative becomes a fun-house-mirror history of the past sixty years, from the atomic night terrors of the Cold War to the technocracy and political division of the present day—a boisterous, tragicomic, magnificently filigreed epic about power and ethics, set in a world transformed by wonders. As a work of cultural exegesis, this is sneakily significant, even a landmark; it’s also ludicrously fun. Wolk sees fascinating patterns—the rise and fall of particular cultural aspirations, and of the storytelling modes that conveyed them. He observes the Marvel story’s progressive visions and its painful stereotypes, its patches of woeful hackwork and stretches of luminous creativity, and the way it all feeds into a potent cosmology that echoes our deepest hopes and fears. This is a huge treat for Marvel fans, but it’s also a revelation for readers who don’t know Doctor Strange from Doctor Doom. Here, truly, are all of the marvels.

People at all levels of medieval society were extremely fascinated by the strange and unknown in the world around them. They tried in various ways to cope with the unfamiliar mysterious, monstrous, marvellous, and miraculous forces in order to understand them and give them a coherent meaning. Voyages were undertaken to remote parts of Asia. Some journeys were real, while others were mere "armchair travels". Most people took the descriptions in travel accounts to be the ultimate truth about the mysterious places in lands far away from Europe. Scholars formed a general view of the God-created cosmos and its seemingly mysterious character, expressed in encyclopedic works, summae, and in medieval maps. Monsters, Marvels and Miracles examines such journeys and landscapes in the Middle Ages.

Collects Marvels X (2020) #1-6. The amazing prequel to the legendary EARTH X trilogy! David has a problem. He’s the last normal human on Earth. He lives in a world of monsters that would love to devour him. And these monsters are his former neighbors — mutating, like the rest of the world, into something strange and frightening and new. David has one hope: to get to New York, where Captain America and the rest of the heroes are. But the big city doesn’t bring the safety he hoped it would. And the heroes don’t know how to cope with a world that’s changing all around them. No matter what Spider-Man or Daredevil or even Doctor Strange do to protect him, they can’t save David from what is hunting him!

The Marvel Book is an exhilarating journey through the endlessly fascinating, ever-dynamic, and awe-inspiring Marvel Comics universe. One Marvel book to guide them all. If you want to understand the Marvel Comics Universe in all its complex glory, The Marvel Book is the only book you need. It is a unique exploration of the vast, interconnected Marvel Comics Multiverse from its birth to the end of everything and beyond. Meticulously researched and expertly written, The Marvel Book is packed with vivid, carefully sourced artwork, illuminating infographics, and incisive, specially curated essays that shed new light on the myriad wonders of the Marvel Comics universe. From iconic Super Heroes such as the Avengers, Spider-Man, and the Black Panther, to revolutionary technology like Iron Man's armors and S.H.I.E.L.D.'s Helicarriers, to enduring villains such as Thanos and Loki, The Marvel Bookexplores the key concepts, characters, and events that have defined and shaped Marvel Comics over the past 80 years. The book's content is divided into key subject areas-The Multiverse, Science and Technology, War and Peace, Cosmic Forces, Magic and the Supernatural, and Alternate Realities-that form the foundations of Marvel Comics. The Marvel Bookis a revealing and invaluable roadmap to a boundless comics universe that no Marvel fan will want to miss! © 2019 MARVEL

Don't miss Selznick's other novels in words and pictures, The Invention of Hugo Cabret and Wonderstruck, which together with The Marvels, form an extraordinary thematic trilogy! A breathtaking new voyage from Caldecott Medalist Brian Selznick.Two stand-alone stories--the first in nearly 400 pages of continuous pictures, the second in prose--create a beguiling narrative puzzle.The journey begins at sea in 1766, with a boy named Billy Marvel. After surviving a shipwreck, he finds work in a London theatre. There, his family flourishes for generations as brilliant actors until 1900, when young Leontes Marvel is banished from the stage.Nearly a century later, runaway Joseph Jervis seeks refuge with an uncle in London. Albert Nightingale's strange, beautiful house, with its mysterious portraits and ghostly presences, captivates Joseph and leads him on a search for clues about the house, his family, and the past.A gripping adventure and an intriguing invitation to decipher how the two stories connect, The Marvels is a loving tribute to the power of story from an artist at the vanguard of creative innovation.