This chapter explores the use of hermaphroditic symbolism (mostly in the mythic “half-and-half” version) in alchemy and in religious symbolism around the figures of Christ and of Adam and Eve. The texts under consideration belong primarily to the 14th and 15th centuries. I’m going to skim this material a bit as it stands aside from the treatment of actual persons.
Medieval (general)
This tag is used when a more specific date isn’t available covering very roughly the 11-14th centuries.
LHMP entry
The legal and social imperative for clear binary sex categories led medieval surgeons (starting around the 13th through 14th century) to propose “correcting” anomalous bodies. This chapter traces several different surgical traditions, in a context where manuals of surgery were attempting to create a more professional approach to the surgical field in general.
These surgical traditions addressed several types of non-normative bodies, including “hermaphrodites,” impotent men, eunuchs, and women with what were considered enlarged genitals.
This chapter looks at depictions in bestiaries of supposedly non-binary animals like the hyena, and how their symbolism was used to bolster anti-Jewish sentiment in the 12th and 13th centuries. As this is tangential to the themes I’m interested in, I won’t summarize it in detail, but there is a motif of comparing men who become “womanized” to the sexually ambiguous hyena, invoking concepts of “uncleanness.”
This chapter connects an interest in non-binary people with a wider interest in “monstrosity,” especially as attributed to foreign (i.e., non-Christian) lands. These images depicted the “hermaphrodites” in the half-and-half version, alongside other imagined beings, such as people with their faces on their chests. By connecting these non-binary figures to other types of “monstrous races,” they were dehumanized—not a natural variation of humanity, but something else entirely.
Christian theology of late antiquity promoted the idea of “primal androgyny,” that is, that human beings were created as androgynous beings (Adam before the separation of Eve) and that this non-binary state was the ideal state for humanity.
This concept fell from popularity around the 12-13th centuries, as androgyny became conflated with dual-bodied hermaphroditism and thus with monstrosity.
The introduction opens with an anecdote about a 14th century Catalan person assigned female, but whose husband petitioned for annulment because she was anatomically incapable of having sex as a woman, due to atypical genitals, including a penis, a very small vaginal opening, and other anomalies. The account doesn’t include any follow-up or any personal testimony from the woman. The crux of the argument was that she could not be categorized as a woman because she could not perform sexually as a woman.
This is a fairly superficial paper comparing differing approaches to assigning gender to intersex people within Christian and Islamic contexts in the pre-modern period. (It’s an undergraduate paper, so the lack of depth is understandable.)
This is a dissertation exploring gender non-conformity in its various expressions, not all of which are relevant to the Project. The author’s thesis, as noted in the abstract is that “the fragmented approach historians have previously taken when examining the lives of gender non-conforming individuals has been inadequate and could be improved by envisioning the individuals not as individual anomalies or aberrations, but as participants in a long cultural tradition of gender non-conformity and transgression throughout western Europe.”
This article is a survey of recent work in trans and intersex historical studies covering the medieval period. Wingard notes that these topics have only been seriously included in book-length studies since 2020, following something of a hiatus in queer medieval history publications in general since the early 2000s. This particular survey focuses on work that studies “lived experience” via documentary sources and non-fiction texts, rather than a broader scope that includes literary and artistic materials.
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