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MONSTRANCE—MONTAGU
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Würzburg. The great museums devoted much attention to the collection and display of malformations, and no account of the subject can be adequate which does not include reference to the magnificent series in the Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons of England, with the descriptive catalogues of the animal malformations written by B. T. Lowne (1893) and of the vegetable malformations by M. T. Masters (1893).

The work hitherto referred to, as well as a vast bulk of scattered contributions to teratology throughout the 19th century, was chiefly descriptive, anatomical and embryological teratology, and carried the experimental side little beyond where it had been left by the St Hilaires. In 1891 Camille Dareste published his Recherches sur la production artificielle des monstruosités, ou essais de tératogénie expérimentale; his experiments, chiefly on the developing egg of the fowl, not only showed the probable cause of many of the most common abnormalities, but practically created a new branch of science, experimental embryology. Teratology has since become a side issue of the general study of the inter-relations between the inherited tendencies of the developing organism and the play of the circumambient media, and must be studied in relation to the work of O. Hertwig, W. Roux, H. Driesch, O. Bütschli, J. Loeb and their school. J. Bland Sutton’s popular Evolution and Disease (1890) puts in a cogent way the relation between comparative anatomy and common abnormalities, whilst W. Bateson in his Materials for the Study of Variation (1894) describes the acquisition of new symmetries by abnormal organs, and discusses the possible relation between abnormalities and the origin of species.

E. Schwalbe’s Morphologie der Missbildungen (1906–1909) is a very complete study of the most modern developments of teratology, and contains a careful and elaborate list of authorities from the earliest times.  (C. C.; P. C. M.) 


MONSTRANCE (through the French from Lat. monstrare, to show), a vessel used in the Roman Church for the exhibition of the Host at Benediction (q.v.) and also when carried in processions. Another name for the vessel is ostensorium, from ostendere, to exhibit, show; whence the usual French name ostensoir. The monstrance was formerly used of a reliquary, exposing the sacred object to view. The earlier monstrances followed the usual shape of these reliquaries, viz. a cylindrical crystal case mounted in metal frames, elaborately ornamented and jewelled. Such often took the form of a turret. There is a 15th-century Italian example in South Kensington Museum of a pilastered turret containing an oblong crystal case, the whole resting on a stemmed base, and surmounted with a cupola. In the 16th century the present shape was adopted, viz. a crystal or glass circular disk, more suited to the shape of the sacred wafer; this is mounted in a frame of golden rays, and the whole is supported by a stem and bases. The exhibition of the Host dates from the institution of the Festival of Corpus Christi (q.v.) by Urban IV. in 1264.


MONSTRELET, ENGUERRAND DE (c. 1400–1453), French chronicler, belonged to a noble family of Picardy. In 1436 and later he held the office of lieutenant of the gavenier (i.e. receiver of the gave, a kind of church rate) at Cambrai, and he seems to have made this city his usual place of residence. He was for some time bailiff of the cathedral chapter and then provost of Cambrai. He was married and left some children when he died on the 20th of July 1453. Little else is known about Monstrelet except that he was present, not at the capture of Joan of Arc, but at her subsequent interview with Philip the Good, duke of Burgundy. Continuing the work of Froissart, Monstrelet wrote a Chronique, which extends to two books and covers the period between 1400 and 1444, when, according to another chronicler, Matthieu d’Escouchy, he ceased to write. But following a custom which was by no means uncommon in the middle ages, a clumsy sequel, extending to 1516, was formed out of various chronicles and tacked on to his work. Monstrelet’s own writings, dealing with the latter part of the Hundred Years’ War, are valuable because they contain a large number of documents which are certainly, and reported speeches which are probably, authentic.” The author, however, shows little power of narration; his work, although clear, is dull, and is strongly tinged with the pedantry of its century, the most pedantic in French history. His somewhat ostentatious assertions of impartiality do not cloak a marked preference for the Burgundians in their struggle with France.

Among many editions of the Chronique may be mentioned the one edited for the Société de l’histoire de France by M. Douët d’Arcq (Paris, 1857–1862), which, however, is not very good. See A. Molinier, Les Sources de l’histoire de France, tomes iv. and v. (Paris, 1904).


MONTAGNAIS (Fr. “mountaineers”), the collective French name (1) for a group of North American Indian tribes of Quebec province, (2) for four tribes of the northern division of the Athabascan stock of North American Indians in the interior of British North America.


MONTAGU (Family). Dru of Montaigu or Montagud, the ancestor of the Montagus, earls of Salisbury, came to England with Robert, count of Mortain, half-brother of William the Conqueror. He is found in Domesday among the chief tenants of the count in Somerset, where Dru held the manor of Shepton, afterwards called Shepton Montagu. Upon the hill of Lutgaresburg, in Bishopston, Robert built the castle which he called Montaigu—but there is no reason for believing that Dru’s surname was derived from the castle, he being probably a Norman born—from Montaigu or Montaigu-les-bois, both in the neighbourhood of Mortain. The Domesday holding of Dru is represented in the return of 1166 by the ten knights’ fee upon which his descendant, another Dru, is assessed. William Montagu of Shepton is among the knights summoned by Henry III. to the Gascon War and to the Welsh border in 1257. His son Simon, the first of the family to make a figure in history, followed Edward I. in 1277 against Llywelyn ap Gruffydd, being then, as it would appear, a minor, and he served again in 1282, when Llywelyn’s power was broken for the last time. By a charter dated in 1290 his Somersetshire manors and the manor of Aston Clinton were confirmed to him by a grant from the Crown. In 1296 a ship under his command broke the blockade of Bordeaux. In 1298 he was summoned as a baron; and in 1301, as Simon lord of Montagu, he sealed the famous letter of the barons to the pope with his seal of the arms of Montagu, the counterseal showing a griffon. One of the earliest examples of quartered arms seen in England was afforded when Simon’s banner displayed at Falkirk in 1298 quartered this griffon, gold on a blue field, with the Montagu’s indented fesse of three fusils. He died in 1317 and was succeeded by his son William (d. 1319), a favourite of Edward II., whose household steward he became, and seneschal of Aquitaine and Gascony. His eldest son, another William, came of age in 1322, and in 1330 led the young king’s partisans by the secret way into Nottingham Castle, and carried off the earl of March. The day before Mortimer had denounced Montagu as a traitor, but Montagu struck at once and his success was rewarded by grants from the forfeited lands of March. In 1337 he was created earl of Salisbury, and on the death of Thomas of Brotherton in 1338 he was made marshal of England. His king employed him in missions to France, Scotland, Germany and Castile, but war was, as with most of the men of his house, the chief business of his short life. At some time between 1340 and 1342 he led an expedition of his own against the Isle of Man, winning from the Scots the little kingdom to which he had inherited a claim. His grandfather Simon is said to have married a certain Auffray or “Aufrica,” sometimes described as “daughter of Fergus and sister of Orray, king of Man,” and sometimes as the grand-daughter and heir of John de Courcy, the conqueror of Ulster, whose wife “Affreca” was sister of King Olaf II. John de Courcy, however, died childless, and in 1287 Simon names his wife as Hawise. The second Aufrica or Affreca claimed the island as heir of Magnus II. (d. 1265), a letter of Edward I. in 1293 citing John of Scotland to answer her appeal to king John’s suzerain. By her charter of 1306 the same Aufreca, styling herself “Aufreca of Counnoght, heir of the land of Man,” granted the island to Simon, and this grant, rather than the marriage universally asserted by Simon’s biographers, was probably the origin of the Montagu