In his book, Tarrying with the Negative, Slavoj Zizek’s cover picture is the Romanian flag with a hole cut out of its center. Zizek describes the photograph: “the rebels [are] waving the national flag, with the red star, the Communist symbol, cut out, so that instead of the symbol standing for the organizing principle of the national life, there was nothing but a hole at its center.” He goes on to call this moment a “salient index of the ‘open’ character of a historical situation ‘in its becoming,’ as Kierkegaard would have put it, of that intermediate phase when the former Master-Signifier, although it has lost the hegemonical power, has not yet been replaced by the new one. When looking at medieval and renaissance monster-culture, the seventeenth century also marks a watershed moment in the perception of anomalous creatures. Previous understandings of the marvelous fail to hold, or are “cut out,” as the realm of the monstrous moves out of the purview of religious prognostication and out from under the thumb of aristocratic collectors. Instead, cheap print brings monstrosity even to those who are unable to attend fairs and popularizes a new kind of secular monster whose implications are “open.”

An instance of one such multi-valenced monster literally traveling to the populace of England at this time is that of Tannakin Skinker. In 1639, a woman named Tannakin Skinker crossed the channel from “Wirkham a neuter towne betweene the Emperour and the Hollander.” She became an instant sensation, as there were five ballads registered about her (only one from the time of her initial appearance survives) and she is mentioned in several tracts and an epigram. I will be focusing on the detailed treatment of Skinker found in the 1640 pamphlet A certaine relation of the hog-faced gentlewoman called Mistris Tannakin Skinker and the 1639 ballad, “A Monstrous Shape or a Shapelesse Monster” by Laurence Price. The anonymous pamphlet tells the story of a woman “Who was betwitched in her mothers wombe in the yeare 1618 . . . And can never recover her true shape, tell she be married.” With fourteen pages of text, the pamphlet is the most complete account of the 1639 appearance of the hog-faced woman hailing from Holland. The one-page broadside ballad, preserved in the collection of Anthony Wood at the Bodliean library (complete with doodlings by Wood in the margin) never even gives her a name.

At a time when monsters were readily available at Bartholomew Fair, Southwark Fair, and even minor street events as well as in coffee houses and taverns in London, what was it about a hog-faced woman that spurred this flurry of print? Was it her extraordinarily monstrous appearance? Probably not. Tannakin Skinker was a woman with the face of a pig, but a broadside depicting two monstrous pigs, one with hands instead of front hooves had been chronicled by Sir John Hayward in 1562. And while pigs have particular biological similarities with humans (early dissectors such as Vesalius often used them as substitutes for humans due to the similarity of their internal organs), the particular conjunction of details that make Skinker compelling are those that make her the perfect emblem for Zizek’s “‘open’ character of a historical situation ‘in its becoming.’” However, I would like to posit that instead of creating a hole at the center of monster-culture as it existed at the time, Tannakin Skinker becomes a positive center for previously marginal figures. Her story both has elements of the old flag of monstrosity in its didactic origin while also heralding a new kind of open signification in its secular, comic, literary and economic elements. Furthermore, this story is not confined to the seventeenth century. It replicates itself in the eighteenth, and most notably, in the nineteenth. Thus, this site examines three narratives from the seventeenth century and four from the nineteenth to isolate descriptions of this woman's body. You may search for an attribute alone to see how the descriptions constellate, intersect, expand, or collapse your notions of what constitutes a pig-faced woman.