Hermaphrodites in Renaissance Europe (review)

In keeping with her specialization in French literature, Kathleen P. Long focuses on written texts to examine the shifting image of the hermaphrodite in early modern Europe. She finds that the hermaphrodite was not a marginal figure, but rather a "cultural icon" (p. 2) represented in poetry, medical treatises, novels, political pamphlets, and alchemical tracts. Given its ambiguity, the hermaphrodite was employed both to assert and to undermine powerful hierarchies, especially those founded on distinctions between men and women. This use was most prominent during the sixteenth century in France, when the wars of religion exacerbated the debate about whether or not differences could coexist in society. Placing her analysis within this cultural context, Long demonstrates that the hermaphrodite was used by alchemists to create a less rigid conception of gender during the second half of the sixteenth century, but was engaged to call for the effacement of difference, particularly the feminine, by contemporary lyrical poets responding to the demands of their politically conservative patrons.

According to Long, her study proposes "a modest corrective to postmodern notions of the primitive nature of early modern understandings of sex, gender, and sexuality" (p. 4). Her careful analysis of the contents of a range of sixteenth-century texts does indeed reveal a contradictory and unstable view of sex and gender. In her discussion of Ambroise Paré's Des monstres et prodiges of 1573, for example, she finds that because the royal barber-surgeon promoted the physical examination of the bodies of hermaphrodites, his descriptions of their multiplicity overwhelmed the rigid categories presented in classical sources. She contends that Paré's appreciation of materiality was reinforced by his reliance on Hippocratic rather than strictly Aristotelian models of reproduction, leading him to award women a more active role in procreation. His account of the necessary mixing of male and female seed to produce an embryo was "on the verge of the two-sex system" (p. 44).

Here, Long invokes the ongoing scholarly debate about whether or not the Galenic one-sex (male) model of the body outlined by historian Thomas Laqueur (Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud, 1990) was ever dominant in pre-eighteenth-century Europe. Historian Helen King has shown that a diverse range of views about the female body was already present in the Hippocratic Corpus, texts that informed Galen's ideas,¹ whereas historian Wendy Churchill has examined medical case books in early modern England to claim that medical practice did not conform to the one-sex view of the body, though official theories sometimes did.² Long participates in the dialogue by arguing that hermaphrodites challenged the one-sex conception of the body well before the eighteenth century, even in medical texts that otherwise adhered to that model, including those of Swiss anatomist Caspar Bauhin and French surgeon Jacques Duval.

In addition to this critique of Laqueur, Long extends previous accounts of the early modern hermaphrodite by attending to the alchemical treatises generally overlooked by scholars; she contends that these publications were generally less conservative than medical tracts, linking the mutability of material forms with the mutability of gender roles. Long's work does not fully consider, however, the concomitant visual arguments made about hermaphrodites, information worthy of study in another publication.