This thing is from The Drolatic Dreams of Pantagruel.
In 1565, French publisher Richard Breton released The Drolatic Dreams of Pantagruel. It was intended to be an extension of The Life of Gargantua and of Pantagruel, by François Rabelais. Rabelais, a renowned French author, had passed away twelve years earlier. Breton looked to be capitalizing off of his popularity.
The book offers a short preface, in which Breton tells readers that “open intellects will find several good inventions in it for preparing extravagances, organizing masquerades, or to apply them as the occasion requires.”
The rest of the book is filled with 120 woodcuts of weird, monstrous creatures—the kind that will haunt your own dreams. Many of them look as if they inspired the beasts in Vlyssis Aldrovandi’s 1642 book, Monstrorum Historia.
More details on The Drolatic Dreams of Pantagruel can be found here.
A few more things from The Drolatic Dreams of Pantagruel.
Even more things from The Drolatic Dreams of Pantagruel.
![Premature Burial [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons-Illustration for Edgar Allan Poe's story The Premature Burial by Harry Clarke (1889-1931), published in 1919.](https://www.weirdhistorian.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/premature-burial-crop-235x190.jpg)