Sex, Identity and Hermaphrodites in Iberia, 1500–1800

Francisco Vazquez Garcia

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9781848933026
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317321187
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

Early modern European thought held that men and women were essentially the same. During the seventeenth century, medical and legal arguments began to turn against this 'one-sex' model, with hermaphroditism seen as a medieval superstition. This book traces this change in Iberia in comparison to the earlier shift in thought in northern Europe.

1 MARVELS, MONSTERS AND PRODIGIES: HERMAPHRODITES AS NATURAL PHENOMENA IN SPAIN, 1500–1700

In this chapter, we illustrate how the notions of Nature, mirabilia and marvels were played out in considerations of sex, sex change and hermaphroditism in Spanish culture in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Crucial to our argument is the elaboration of the working of the ‘one-sex’ model as understood by Laqueur and the overlapping and on occasion competing theories of Galen, Aristotle and Hippocrates in order to explain these phenomena. In the next chapter, we will provide an overview of how the notion of the ‘true rank’ was supplanted by the medical category of the ‘true sex’ in the nineteenth century.

Mirabilia

The category mirabilia designated extraordinary beings and events, ‘marvels’ that showed the omnipotence and inscrutability of divine design. This tradition stretches back to the Augustinian text De Civitate Dei, and was followed by Saint Isidore’s Etymologies.¹ Portents are not necessarily counter-natural beings or isolated cases with no significance; they are natural rarities that always have their analogies in the Universe. The Universe is conceived as a dense network of relations which reveal a hidden harmony, known by God but of which humans are ignorant. Because of this ignorance, humans perceive these figures as disconcerting and horrific.

It has been argued, only partly successfully, that in the later medieval period, as a result of the social and cultural crisis that took place in the fourteenth century in the wake of plagues, massacres and famines, the belief in the harmony of the Universe was undermined. The presence of the monster was understood as evidence of the work of the devil and of great calamity to come.² It has also been argued that this understanding would give way, in the light of the coming of science, to a naturalist perception of the monster in the context of an emerging literature on ‘marvels’. This literature stimulated devotion to pleasure and a certain curiosity towards this figure, which was presented as evidence of the benevolence of God working through a prolific and diverse expression of the natural world.³ This image would constitute the preface to seeing the monster as an error of Nature particularly from the seventeenth century onwards. This error of Nature would be a deformity that could be explained by purely immanent causes. In this way, a process of disenchantment and rationality would be complete.⁴

But we know that things are not quite so simple. Throughout the Middle Ages there prevailed a certain division between the representation of the monster as a species from exotic lands and the idea of the monster as a warning of disaster. This dual conception would come, on the one hand, from travel literature, centred on the description of marvels (species that showed the unlimited power of the Creator) and, on the other hand, from a literature of prodigies that presented monstrous individuals, not species, as a sign of evil.⁵ From the sixteenth century this distinction became less clear. Both portentous individuals and species could be understood to show the hidden harmonies of the cosmos, thus proving divine will. At the same time, the tradition that saw the monster as a punishment from Providence or a sign of disaster to come survived.⁶

Rather than this teleological account, which argues for a sceptical and disenchanting modernity, what takes place in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is a number of mixed understandings that exalt the monster as a marvel and at the same time fear it as a manifestation of evil. This ambivalence is clear in the case of the hermaphrodite and changes of sex, despite the fact that most medical opinions classify these as natural happenings. They are still understood to represent something out of the ordinary or rare, and they are represented as such in the Spanish case in the literature on marvels and in the ‘relaciones de sucesos’.

The genre of the literature on marvels⁷ maintains its presence throughout the whole of the Spanish modern period,⁸ and even still has its expressions beyond the end of the seventeenth century.⁹ Examples of this kind of literature, mainly penned by ecclesiastics during the period 1540 to 1677, clearly show the interest in sexually intermediate persons described as ‘marvels’. The notion of mirabilia is maintained throughout this period in this kind of text. The apparently deformed and disordered show the limitations of human intellect and the complexity and brilliance of the order imposed by God, however inscrutable to human eyes.¹⁰

Hermaphrodites and episodes where masculinization occurs (in contradistinction to ‘feminizing’ incidents) are presented in these sources under the rubric of ‘natural’ events, even though they are considered to be extraordinary. Usually individual cases are referred to, although there are also, following the medieval tradition of travel literature, accounts of whole exotic peoples who have the reputation of hermaphroditism. The work of Pliny, as presented by the philosopher Calliphanes, falls into this category.¹¹

The description ‘natural’ as used to refer to hermaphrodites, manly women or viragines¹² and masculinized females¹³ is not the same as our description of such phenomena as ‘biological’. In this literature, sex is identified as a variant of rank. The best example of this is offered by Antonio de Torquemada (whose work is discussed by Martín del Río and Juan de la Cerda).¹⁴ Torquemada referred to the case of a woman from Condado de Benavente (Zamora), who was married to a poor labourer. One night the woman decided to leave her husband under the disguise of some clothes stolen from a local boy. In this way she adopted the lifestyle of a man and worked as such:

y estando así, o que la naturaleza obrase en ella con tal pujante virtud que bastase para ello, o que la imaginación intensa de verse en el hábito de hombre tuviese tanto poder que viniese a hacer el efecto, ella se convirtió en varón, y se casó con otra mujer … y hasta que un hombre que de antes la conocía, hallándose en el lugar de donde estaba, y viendo la semejanza que tenía con la que él le había conocido, le preguntó si por ventura era su hermano, y esta mujer, hecha varón, fiándose de él, le dijo el secreto de todo que había sucedido, rogándole con gran instancia que en ninguna manera le descubriese.

(And so, whether Nature alone was sufficient to work with such strength and virtue or whether it was the intense power of the imagination on seeing herself in the habit of a man that had this effect, she was converted into a man and married another woman … and until another man from before recognized her, finding her in this place, and seeing that she bore a resemblance to when he had known her, asked her if by chance she was a brother and this woman, who had become a man, told him in trust and secret everything that had happened and pleaded insistently that he should reveal nothing.)¹⁵

The change in clothing and occupation is what unleashes her sexual transformation, through either the action of imagination or that of Nature.¹⁶ This same logic explains how the heroines of Golden Age drama, just by dressing as men, are capable of being bestowed with male abilities as if by magic.¹⁷ In this case that occurred in Benavente, it is as if the abandonment of her state as a married woman and the taking on of the appearance of a man brought about her bodily transformation; it is as if the physical were an external expression of her ‘state’. In addition, in the light of the uncertainty that surrounded the possession of one state or another in terms of right, duties and obligations, her act of fraud consists in taking on privileges that do not correspond to her. But her status is not reducible to either biological sex or gender, and neither is reducible to the other.¹⁸ Gender does not provide the foundation of her sex because her ‘nature’ is only distinguished on the basis of her dress or occupation. It is as if sex and gender were undifferentiated, making up something else: her rank in society, something stable in itself in an ordered society but susceptible to disordering and confusion in exceptional cases.

When discussing the natural character of hermaphrodites and virilized women, all these texts follow similar formats. First of all, they present their structure of argument, like the quaestiones or as in examinations of conscience (Martín del Río, Antonio de Fuentelapeña); they opt for a dialogical form (Alonso de Fuentes, Antonio de Torquemada, Juan de Pineda), or they adopt a narrative description (Pedro Mexía, Juan Eusebio Nieremberg, Juan de la Cerda). They all cite ancient authorities on these matters (for example, Pliny, Ovid, Hippocrates, Phlegon, Aulus Gelius and Livy) and modern authorities (Joviano Pontano, Amato Lusitano, Fulgoso, Montaigne) who affirmed the existence of hermaphrodites and masculinized women.

In addition, these authors display an eclectic array of shared medical knowledge. This includes the Hippocratic theory of humours and generation, references to Galen and Avicenna whose accounts presented the male and female organs as identical in structure but not in position,¹⁹ and the mention of the Aristotelian teleological principle which accounted for masculinization of women as ‘improvements’. In the Aristotelian vein too was the discussion over whether the woman was a weaker form of man or not.²⁰

In this mixture of positions, the Hippocratic one-sex model prevails, although accounts are much nuanced. The two accounts of ‘marvels’ that display most medical arguments, that of Fuentelapeña and especially that of Martín del Río, seem to have come under the influence of the French medical doctor André du Laurens (1550–1609). Du Laurens was the author of Historia Anatomica Humani Corporis (1593) and defended, according to Michael Stolberg,²¹ the Aristotelian model of the two dichotomous sexes. The reading of this work, clearly first-hand in the case of Martín del Río in 1606 and perhaps second-hand by Fuentelapeña, sounds a cautionary note over the supposed hegemony of the one-sex model in the Spanish case.

In the case of Fuentelapeña, who, in contrast to strict Aristotelian thought, nowhere doubts the existence of true hermaphrodites, the explanation of this ‘marvel’²² draws on a clearly Hippocratic account, although it is taken from Albertus Magnus.²³ The allusion to André du Laurens (‘Andrés Lorenço’) is occasional and serves merely to ratify his own thesis: that women who change into men are in reality ‘hidden hermaphrodites’, beings that possess two natures, although this has become visible only because of excessive natural heat.²⁴ Strictly, then, sexual transformation is not possible. Fuentelapeña includes du Laurens (and del Río) among those who hold this opinion. He is aware that du Laurens emphasizes sexual difference (‘no sólo en el modo de la situación, sino que también en el número, forma y fábrica se diferencian’ (not only in respect of placement but also in number, form and make-up are they differentiated)), thus placing himself against the majority which was in favour of the Hippocratic-Galenic paradigm of the single sex. Fuentelapeña finally, however, seems to move towards an Arabigo-Galenic alternative which, without admitting true sex changes (which are understood as manifestations of the invisible sex of hidden hermaphrodites), supports the ‘one-sex’ model:

Y finalmente otros sienten y es lo más cierto, que aunque el instrumento sea único, puede invertirse de adentro afuera, como un guante, y que de una manera será sexo viril, y femenino de la otra, pues como sienten Galeno, Egineta, Avicena, Razes y otros muchos médicos, las mujeres tienen los mesmos vasos seminales y órganos que sirven a la generación, que los hombres.

(And finally, others believe and it is certainly true that although the instrument is identical, what is inside can be inverted, like a glove, and that what is the male sex on the one hand may be the female sex on the other. Just as Galen, Paul of Aegina, Avicenna and Rhazes argue, women possess the same seminal ducts and organs that serve generation as men.)²⁵

The case of Martín del Río is different. In the second edition of his work Disquisiciones Mágicas, from 1612, he declares that he has read the Historia Anatómica by Andrés de Lorenzo in 1606.²⁶ This reading, Del Río avers, confirmed his own understanding that supposed masculinized women were in fact ‘hermaphrodites’ who possessed both sexes. As a result, the transformation of sex would be nothing more than the exteriorization of the male nature that had been hitherto hidden.²⁷

However, the work by du Laurens goes further than affirming the existence of hermaphrodites. Martín del Río tells us that du Laurens effectively rejects the one-sex paradigm:

Allí expone [du Laurens] al detalle cómo es falsa la doctrina médica común acerca del varón inverso escondido en la mujer. Los órganos genitales de uno y otro sexo difieren en absoluto, no sólo por su situación, sino por su número, forma y estructura.

([du Laurens] argues in detail how false is the medical doctrine that takes the inverted male to be hidden in the body of the woman. The genital organs of one and the other are fundamentally different, not only in their position, but in their number, form and structure.)²⁸

The renowned demonologist and Jesuit appears to subscribe to this dualist model, a move that allows him to reinterpret two elements associated with the one-sex model. The first of these is that the woman is a failed or weakened form of man. Secondly, he revises the teleological notion referred to above (‘la naturaleza siempre tiende a lo más perfecto’ (nature tends towards perfection)). With respect to the first matter, he suggests, following du Laurens, that woman is not an incomplete man as in the hierarchical and vertical system of the one-sex model but a finished organism that possesses its own structure. This structure corresponds to the function of womankind: ‘fue menester que la mujer tuviese la conformación que tiene, pues de otro modo no se conse...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Sex, Gender and Historicity
• 1 Marvels, Monsters and Prodigies: Hermaphrodites as Natural Phenomena in Spain, 1500–1700
• 2 Sexual Transgression and Hermaphroditism: The ‘New World’ and Imperial Subjectivity
• 3 The Expulsion of the Marvellous: The Decline of the ‘One-Sex’ Model, 1750–1830
• 4 Hermaphroditism in Portugal
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index