Ambiguous Gender in Early Modern Spain and Portugal: Inquisitors, Doctors and the Transgression of Gender Norms by François Soyer (review)

Over the last few years the gender history of Renaissance Europe has increasingly turned to the malleability of the body and its connection to unstable gender identities. François Soyer examines the phenomenon of gender ambiguity in early modern Spain and Portugal and thereby contributes to this broader literature. By analyzing inquisitorial records, Soyer unpacks the intersection between cultural expectations and everyday experiences at the heart of subversive gender practices. Through a series of case studies involving individuals prosecuted for a variety of crimes against sexual and gender mores, Soyer argues that the rigidity of gender norms paradoxically provided enough open space for the transgression of these codes and the practice of gender ambiguity.

The first section of the book provides the necessary context for the later examination of four specific inquisitorial cases. Chapter 1, for instance, outlines how early modern Iberians understood gender identity. As much as church courts and medical practice favored biological definitions of gender, the intimate connection between body practices, such as dress and mannerisms, and gender identity, as well as the scientific allowance for spontaneous sex changes meant individuals could easily destabilize such constructs. Furthermore, since gender identity was closely intertwined with sexuality, assumptions about gender ambiguity were linked to fears about homosexuality.

Just as the inquisitorial cases that reflected ambiguous gender practices focused often on male sodomy, and to a lesser extent lesbianism, other trials, as discussed in Chapter 2, specifically dealt with suspicions of hermaphroditism or spontaneous sex changes. It was in such trials that early modern medical understandings of hermaphrodites played an important role. The question on the nature of hermaphrodites was much debated at the time. Galenic approaches favored a one-sex model that saw female genitals as the inversion of male ones, thus allowing for hermaphroditism as a mere abnormal physical development. Aristotelian notions, on the other hand, focused on a two-sex model which constructed hermaphrodites as monsters and aberrations. Despite such theoretical preoccupations, inquisitors regularly employed the services of physicians to examine suspected hermaphrodites and, thus, determine their sex.

Having provided this broader context on Iberian understandings of gender identity, sex, and hermaphroditism, Soyer then focuses on four specific Spanish and Portuguese trials. Chapter 3 examines the 1650 case of Valencia’s Francisco Roca, suspected of being a woman married as a man, but ultimately tried for sodomy. The Portuguese Tribunal of Coimbra’s 1698 trial of father Pedro Furtado, also known as Paula and reputed to be a woman by the men who had sex with him, provides the narrative for Chapter 4. Another case of ambiguous gender concerned Joseph/Josepha Martins who was tried by the Portuguese inquisitorial court of Évora in 1725 and is analyzed in Chapter 5. Finally, Chapter 6 details the 1741 Portuguese trial of sister Maria Duran, suspected of having obtained a penis through a pact with the Devil in order to have sex with other women in her convent.

The fascinating aspect of all these cases, as Soyer argues, remains the ease with which the defendants were able to change gender in the eyes of lovers and the broader populace. Two factors played an important role in this gender instability. First, the prevailing medical norms that allowed for both hermaphroditism and spontaneous sex changes provided a patina of verisimilitude to the rumors of gender ambiguity circulating about them. Second, because gender identity was so strongly connected to fixed expectations of behavior, dress, and sexuality, engaging in same-sex practices and performing gender allowed these defendants to claim such malleable identities.

While the judicial reliance on physical examinations by doctors to ascertain gender often disproved, in inquisitors’ eyes, such claims, the salient point remains the ease with which gender identity could be scrambled and destabilized. Soyer’s findings are important because they show how medical knowledge and culturally based expectations about...