How to Look at a Hermaphrodite in Early Modern England

This essay argues that the curiosity surrounding hermaphrodites in the early modern period is generated by the very texts in which they appear, texts that train the reader to want to examine the hermaphrodite's body. By reading sixteenth-century medical texts alongside English translations of Ovid's tale of Salmacis and Hermaphroditus, I show that just as doctors were beginning to lift up the skirts of historical hermaphrodites and publish descriptions of what they found, Ovidian poets were cloaking the hermaphrodite's sexual parts and thereby frustrating their readers' curiosity. This essay, then, shows how Ovidian poetry diverges from what has been described as the early modern "culture of dissection," thus complicating the conventional narrative of the rise of empiricism.