Hermaphrodites in Renaissance Europe (review)

Kathleen P. Long’s exploration of the hermaphrodite in Europe provides a rich and revealing study of this figure in the early modern period, and presents an interdisciplinary and intertextual approach to gender studies. Indeed, the broad variety of documents analyzed in this book is impressively extensive: scientific and alchemical treatises, political pamphlets, medical texts, novels, and poetry. According to Long, the hermaphrodite is an ever-changing figure that reveals all aspects of the times in which it surfaced, mostly the unsettled decades of the Renaissance troubled by several crises. The book’s eight chapters make a thorough account of how the very existence of the hermaphrodite put into question the foundations of natural laws that distinguished the two sexes and their many well-defined functions.

Long begins with Greek and Roman depictions and moves to an analysis of sex theories found in the medical treatises of Paré, Bauhin, and Duval, who mostly use the figure of the hermaphrodite to discuss differences between the male and female body in the contexts of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century cultural notions of gender. While attempting to explain and justify the hermaphrodites monstrosity, Bauhin blames predicaments that occurred at the moment of conception. Duval, on the other hand, continues this discourse and considers the hermaphrodite in the sphere of heterosexual reproduction and female sexuality. Throughout the Renaissance, sexual ambiguity was considered a threat to society, and therefore continued to exist at the heart of cultural, political, medical, and literary debates. Chapter 4 studies in depth the role of the hermaphrodite in alchemy, where it attained increased importance. Long provides an ambitious analysis of alchemical texts, such as Paracelsus’s work, in which the hermaphrodite becomes the symbol of conjunction and balancing of male and female. Her discussion continues in chapter 5 with Nuysement’s alchemical texts and their gendered representation of the process of generation, which she claims is a product of dissolution of female and male. She furthermore moves to carefully examine Nuysement’s Poème philosophic and its hermaphroditic entity, in which gender and power are closely entwined. This chapter skillfully shows how the figure of the hermaphrodite is once again associated with transgression, bordering often with incest and cannibalism. It also convincingly suggests that alchemical writings mirror closely the nature of the hermaphrodite as they often offer two divergent readings.

Chapter 6 is my favorite: in “Lyric Hermaphrodite,” Long superbly examines the lyric production of the poets of Henri III of Valois, in which Petrarchism commingles with religious conflicts and horrors. The king and his mignons were often portrayed as a mix of hermaphrodite, androgyne, transvestite, and bisexual, thereby blending even more gender boundaries, and fueling ambiguity in the political, cultural, and literary domains of his reign. Théodore Agrippa d’Aubigné, Philippe Desportes, Hesteau de Nuysement, and other poets masterfully respond to the baroque spirit of these years by weaving in their verses multilayered ambiguities of gender, sex, body, as well as difference as a poetic category. Sexual difference in particular is at once celebrated and threatened in court poetry, because, as Long often points out throughout her book, this paradox epitomized and mimicked the many fears in early modern Europe and in France in particular. Chapter 7 concentrates on the various portrayals of Henri III and his mignons because of their ambiguous sexual orientation and their desire to appear female. In poetry and political pamphlets, Henri III’s lack of a well-defined sexuality was associated with the end of sixteenth-century social disorder: the reversal of gender roles threatened social harmony; therefore, the hermaphrodite became once again a horrific monster. Long’s persuasive accounts of the many, yet circular and self-generating, ways in which the hermaphrodite was scrutinized and portrayed throughout the Renaissance concludes with a solid interpretation of the novel Description de l’Isle des Hermaphrodites by Thomas Artus. This impressive text raises many questions of sexuality, language...