Introduction to Sex, Identity and Hermaphrodites in Iberia, 1500-1800

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INTRODUCTION: SEX, GENDER AND

HISTORICITY

In a short article published in 1928 in the highly specialist medico-legal jour-nal Archivo de Medicina Legal , the orensic doctor Asdrúbal António de Aguiar

provided what was one o the rst overviews on hermaphroditism in early twenti-eth-century Portuguese medical circles. De Aguiar’s discussion and reproductiono documentation relevant to a long-lost case o suspected hermaphroditism rom1622 at the Convent o Santa Cruz in the small Alentejo town o Vila Viçosa

was preceded by a historical and diagnostic ramework that would structure theauthor’s uture work on this and related subjects pertaining to sexual matters. 1 Tat this was a relatively unexplored area o Portuguese history and legal medicine

was emphasized by de Aguiar – he noted that ‘Não abundam em Portugal alusõesa antigos casos de hermaroditismo’ (Tere is not an abundance o allusions in

Portugal to historical cases o hermaphroditism)2

– and despite some other stud-ies rom the 1920s and 1930s,3 until recently this lack o attention has prevailed.4 Te state o historiography in respect o studies on hermaphroditism and sexchange in Spain, by contrast, is more advanced, not only in terms o historicalcultural analysis, or example on the subject o ‘gender subversion’ in Golden Ageliterature and theatre, but also in terms o specic studies on dissident guressuch as Catalina de Erauso;5 but comparative research into hermaphroditism inIberia is in its inancy. Comparisons between Iberian realities and those o Europemore generally are also sorely lacking; most volumes on hermaphroditism in thisgeographical sphere conne their attention to France, Germany and Britain, withthe occasional reerence to ‘periphery’ countries such as Italy and to Greece orthe ancient or mythological background.6

Te purpose o this study is to deepen our knowledge o discussions on theo-ries about cases o hermaphroditism and sex change in Iberia over the years 1500to 1800. Although our principal ocus will be on discourse on hermaphroditismand sex change in Spain, with only one chapter specically on Portugal, we hope tosuggest that given the nature o the institutions that were common to both coun-tries – such as the Inquisition, the transer o knowledge between theological anduniversity centres such as Coimbra and Salamanca, and the very act o migration,



2 Sex, Identity and Hermaphrodites in Iberia, 1500–1800

especially o Jews and conversos, between Spain and Portugal – there were com-monalities across Iberia in respect o the phenomenon o hermaphroditism.7

Te existence o the Inquisition, established in Spain in 1478 and Portu-gal in 1536, despite diferent competencies according to region, provided aset o knowledges and languages about a range o issues relating to religiousobservance and, not least, to matters o a sexual nature. While the question o sodomy – that ‘utterly conused category’ as Foucault has called it, given therange o practices that it could describe8 – became included in the remit o theInquisition in Aragon, it was not the case in Castile, where it was under the

jurisdiction o the civil authorities;9 in Portugal it was rmly placed in the remito the Inquisition rom the latter’s inception. Te lie story o one scienticgure who, among a vast range o other topics, wrote about hermaphroditism,Issac Cardoso, was typical o the kind o communication and interconnectionsbetween Spanish and Portuguese medical and philosophical commentators onquestions o ‘natural history’. Tat many o these philosophers were o Jewishbackground is worthy o comment. Although it is not argued here that there

was anything specic about Jewish thought on hermaphroditism, gures suchas Cardoso were typical o the overlap between exiled individuals and scienticthought.10 His parents were Spanish conversos who lived in Portugal until 1610

when they returned to Medina de Rioseco.11 He went to Italy in 1648, settling in Venice and then Verona. In 1673 he published his Philosophia libera at Venicein homage to the Venetian authorities. As the historian Henry Kamen observes,

‘Cardoso’s story was one among many, or throughout those generations there was a constant movement o conversos between Portugal and Spain, as wellas a regular migration o the exiles in Europe rom one Jewish community toanother’.12 Other scientists and philosophers, such as Amatus Lusitanus, who

was cited reely in Spanish sources in Latin or in the vernacular, is an example o cross-Iberian discourse on the subject o hermaphroditism itsel.

In addition to this comparative approach, in contrast to some o the stud-ies reerred to above, we place particular emphasis on the medical, legal,

philosophical, cultural and theological rationales and debates which ramedhermaphroditism in this period. Such debates provided the ramework whereby ambivalent sex was made intelligible to those who studied the subject in Iberiarom the sixteenth to the nineteenth century as a product o the mentality o the

times. In order not to engage in what Lucien Febvre called ‘psychological anach-ronism’,13 it is important not only to examine in detail the thought emerging rom a range o sources but also to provide a mental map whereby questions suchas ‘sex’ and ‘gender’ can be successully interrogated, without imposing currentinterpretations on these subjects and without necessarily adopting, or example,any strict association between, on the one hand, culture and gender and, on theother, biology and maleness or emaleness as explanatory paradigms.



Introduction 3

Te ‘One-Sex’ Model and ‘Gender’ Perormativity

In order to understand the social conditions that provide a context or and tem- per the circulation o ideas in any given society and historical period, we needto attempt to determine the ‘tacit truths’ that make up a culture. 14 Tis is what

we need to do when the question o personal identity is examined and, morespecically, when sexual identity is interrogated in early modern societies. Tedistinction between men and women, understood as a given in the daily lie o the Ancien Régime, only became problematic when cracks and tensions emergedaround it. During this period, some individuals were pronounced hermaphro-dites, there were cases o changing sex, or people adopted the appearance o the

other sex, and these are documented extensively in medical, juridical, theologicaland literary sources o the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Tese examplesreveal clearly how society at that time dealt with the question o sexual identity.

o put this in the terms employed by Judith Butler, the construction o gen-dered identities takes place by means o a process o exclusion. Tose gures andbehaviours that do not observe, or that are excessive to, dichotomous sex andgender parameters and that operate outside o ‘normal’ human practice ormthe subjects o this kind o analysis. As these abject behaviours can only be con-sidered rom the perspective o the normative matrix that suppresses them, they cannot constitute an absolute externality to that matrix but an expression o thedynamics that occur within it.15 o ocus on Spain alone or a moment, as wehave stated and despite the act that research on these questions has not been as

extensive as or some northern European countries, it is no longer possible to say that ‘sexually intermediate’ individuals have been without their historian. Fur-thermore, the role o Spanish theologians, juridical experts, doctors and literary gures in the construction o Western Christian normativity on the subject o hermaphroditism has now been shown to have been o the rst order.16

Any examination o the practices and representations which occurred aroundsexually ambiguous persons in modern Spain must necessarily draw on the work o Michel Foucault and Tomas Laqueur. Laqueur, especially, has marked outthe terrain o historiographical analysis on this ront in the last een years.17 Both authors have not only shown that sexual dimorphism (the identication o

women and men as possessing distinct and incommensurable biological difer-ences) is a relatively recent historical phenomenon; at the same time, they haveseparated gender characteristics (masculine/eminine), the basis o androcentricdomination, rom the biological dualism o the sexes (male/emale). Genderdivisions do not necessarily depend intellectually on sex diferentiation. Te ideathat the distinction between men and women is based on biological diferencesbetween the sexes would be a cultural understanding only consolidated by medi-cal knowledge in the eighteenth century, thus breaking with the predominance




o the hierarchical Hippocratic ‘one-sex’ model that was up to then hegemonic.Tis cultural understanding was also brought about (as Laqueur has argued) by the new liberal political order or by the emergence o modern biopolitics andthe nineteenth-century desire to determine the ‘true sex’ in cases o doubtulidentity (as Foucault has argued).

In this way, the work o Judith Butler is once more illuminating in respecto the characteristics and unctioning o what she has called the ‘heterosexualmatrix’. Tis device unctions on the basis o the perormative reiteration o thenorms that constitute it, a process that is never nished or ever ully stable. Itsever-changing nature produces abject practices and subjects that can become asource o subversive possibilities, and in this way, we can observe how the matrixis itsel subject to a variety o changeable historical congurations that can bechallenged at any given moment. Butler considers that intersexuality and trans-sexualism, excluded as categories o abjection, constitute subversive reiterationso the heterosexual matrix.18

It is undeniable that both Laqueur’s and Foucault’s work on the sexed body has supposed a orm o analysis that has le behind the naturalist ocus oferedby the biological sciences.19 As any other object o sociological analysis, the sexedbody must be understood in the context o a strict historical analysis.20 Te task or the social scientist and historian is to reconstruct, through comparison, theseries o historical congurations, structures and diferences inhabited by thesubject. In other words, any analysis rom a social science perspective should

always place the body in a precise spatial and chronological ramework. oooen in the history o the biological sciences, historical sources are interrogatedas i they existed atemporally, to be understood with reerence to existing legalrameworks and scientic terminology.21 Such a methodology eliminates pre-cisely what is o interest to the historian, who comprehends the body within aspecic contextual and cultural context in which the body makes and is made upby predominating practices in any given society.

Foucault’s and Laqueur’s work on the history o sexual dimorphism has beenundamental or the understanding o the body as the subject o sociologicalanalysis. Te work o the sociologist does not rely on the discussion o empirical

propositions, that is, alsiable a rmations such as an examination o the ‘errors’made by Renaissance anatomists on questions o ‘menstruating men’ or sudden

changes o sex. Historians and social scientists deal with perormative questions,not those o ‘truthulness’ or ‘alsehood’; they are interested in the ‘grammatical

propositions’ o Wittgenstein and the ‘énoncés’ o Foucault.22 Tis distinctiondoes not necessarily mean that it is not possible to analyse the past by drawing on current scientic terminology, but it does mean that we are explicit about ourintentions and our epistemological outlook.23



Introduction 5

A second obstacle that must be heeded is the tendency to treat past orms o sexual ambiguity too benevolently. Tis kind o retrospective utopianism is in

part a result o the relativization o the present that accompanies all historicalanalysis o sexuality. It is an error that Foucault appears to succumb to when heconsiders hermaphrodites in the Middle Ages and Renaissance whereby suppos-edly, on reaching adulthood, they could elect the sex they wished provided thatthey stayed aithul to that sex or the whole o their lives.24 In act this practice,

which was permitted by certain legal traditions, only applied to exceptional casessuch as those hermaphrodites whose predominant sex on birth could not beidentied. Laqueur, or his part, has detected this excessive utopianism in Fou-cault’s work. Given that the distinctions between the genders was not oundedupon any biological diferences between the sexes, these distinctions, as in any

patriarchal order, were based on strict prohibitions and punishments that wouldbe applied to any transgressor.25 In other words, the extensive understanding o hermaphrodites as naturally occurring possibilities and not monsters in humanorm did not in reality allow greater exibility or rights or these subjects dur-ing the modern period in comparison to their treatment rom the nineteenthcentury onwards. In this century, they became teratological gures whosedeormities hid their ‘true sex’.

Tirdly, it is important that historical research does not all into another trapin the understanding o this phenomenon. On the one hand, the attempt todiscover a hegemonic model, a monist schema or ‘one-sex’ model, a dualist inter-

pretation or the visualizing o three sexes at any given time should be avoided.26

On the other hand, it would be a mistake to avoid trying to perceive certainidealized types to aid analysis on the basis that the enormous diversity o models

presented by the sources would impede such an undertaking. Te rst optioncould lead to a certain degree o dogmatism whereby the documents are only read in accordance with a priori understandings in an ad hoc manner and any evidence to the contrary saely eliminated. o some degree Laqueur has ollowedthis route, as have some o his detractors.27

Te inverse scenario would result in a kind o difuse empiricism whereby models were rejected resulting in a straightorward reading o what is said in thedocuments. Such a stance can be seen at times in the work o Joan Cadden in herexamination o the plurality o understandings current in medieval medicine.28

Nevertheless, it is true to say, as Cadden points out, that not all reerences to Aris-totle’s theories o generation in medieval times imply the hegemony o a dualistmodel o the sexes, which was opposed to the recognition o sex changes or realhermaphrodites.29 But it is important to distinguish between the purely empiricalreality o quotations rom Aristotelian works and the ideal type that authors suchas Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park designate, as a orm o abbreviation (inthe same way as Max Weber wrote about the ‘Protestant ethic’), o the ‘Aristote-lian model’ whose roots can be traced in De Generatione Animalium.30




Aristotelian, Galenic and Hippocratic Interpretationsand Social Rank

In addition to recognizing the shortcomings o Laqueur’s approach and thereby accepting that a dualist Aristotelian model coexisted with a Hippocratic-Galenicunderstanding, as Lorraine Daston and Katherine Park have suggested, there isan important distinction to be made between the ‘heterosexual matrix’ o this

period and that which emerged during the Enlightenment. In the same way as itsHippocratic counterpart, the Aristotelian interpretation was vertical and hierar-chical and represented women as mutilated or accidental men.31 Tis had littlein common with the Enlightenment and nineteenth-century understanding o

incommensurable diferences between men and women situated on a horizontal plane. Te Aristotelian interpretation o the sexes did not consider biolog y, thesex o the organism, as the stable basis whereby visible diferences in culture,behaviour and roles as established by gender were in act played out. Beyond thedivide o dimorphism, Renaissance32 and Baroque cultures gave preerence to ateleological continuum that assimilated identities as a succession o ‘olds’33 andthat established the male sex/gender as the normative rame.

Rather than the coexistence o two incompatible models (the Aristotelianand Hippocratic-Galenic), thereore, what prevailed in the modern period was a

particular expression o a sex/gender regime or heterosexual matrix inhabited by a range o identities and behaviours which were in turn prone to controversy inthe juridical, medical and theological elds. Te challenge in this light is not toargue over which model was predominant in Spanish or Portuguese culture dur-ing the 1600s but rather to analyse the specicity and the ambivalences o thissex/gender regime within the particular time scale that is interrogated.

In this sense, we should also be careul when analysing the culture o the Ancien Régime not to all into an anachronistic interpretation o the very cat-egories o sex and gender. Following Laqueur, we know that in Europe in thesixteenth and seventeenth centuries strict diferences between the social sexes,that is, in terms o what could be expressed as ‘gender’, were not based on biologi-cal diferences.34 o be a woman or a man was not so much to possess a particularbiological quality but rather to display a social attribute. In sources recounting news o prodigies or tragic occurrences (the ‘relaciones de sucesos’) in Spain in

the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, it is airly common to nd mentions o sex change and the existence o hermaphrodites. In this kind o literature, sex isreerred to as a ‘habit’ or ‘state’ (the amous Elena de Céspedes around 1587 spokeo ‘taking the habit o a man’; Catalina de Erauso, who decided to live as a man in1600, spoke o ‘declaring her state’; and the nun Fernanda Fernández in 1792 said‘I have taken the habit o a man’ in order to reer to her change o sex).35 o be onesex or the other was like belonging to what we could designate as a particular rank



Introduction 7

or social status.36 o change sex was to take a diferent kind o state, similar to thattransited between singlehood and marriage. Just as one may be a noble or a vassal,one was a man or a woman. o belong to one or the other meant a series o privi-leges or prerogatives that the other did not have. Just as someone could not carry a sword or display certain signs o privilege, in accordance with rules governing clothing and presentation,37 neither could a man dress as a woman or vice versa,except in exceptional circumstances such as in the theatre, masquerades or as aresult o special permission granted by an ecclesiastical authority. But in the lighto this, it cannot be said that in the Ancien Régime sex was subordinated to genderor that society somehow subscribed, avant la lettre, to a ‘social constructionist’

perspective.38 Instead, the distinction between sex and gender was meaningless, a peculiarity o the ‘heterosexual matrix’ o the period.39

Te biological in this period was never presented as the purely biologicalor as ‘bare lie’.40 It was understood rom two perspectives: on the one hand, itexpressed a transcendent order, that o Nature as a ‘vital orce’ and as a moralsphere ruled by God. Physis was not understood as something static; it was assim-ilated as part o an expression o dynamism whereby there prevailed an incessantgeneration o orm that in turn displayed the innite power o the Summum

Artifex .41 Te occurrence o extraordinary or ‘marvellous’ events expressed, as part o a tradition that went back to Saint Agustin, the omnipotence o divine will.42 Te same occurred with the birth o hermaphrodites or with sex changes(understood as ‘improvements’) rom women to men. At the same time, divine

creation was thought to be maniest in human reproduction, and this demandedthe existence o ully diferentiated men and women.43 Tere was no contradic-tion between a orm o biology that allowed or intermediate gures in terms o sex and an institutional ramework that excluded them in ‘gender’ terms. Both

possibilities were inscribed in Nature, which was understood as a maniestationo divine will. For this reason, it has been argued that ‘biopolitics’, a power thatimmunizes ‘bare lie’, could only come about in the gap le by the disappearanceo the previous theologically based order.44

On the other hand, the second understanding o the biological, in additionto this vertical conception, linked the body and personal identity by means o ahorizontal network o lineages, corporations and amiliar relations. One’s name,rights, obligations and prerogatives involved the body in a network o honours

and dependencies. Tis ‘deployment o alliances’ implied a particular regime o visibility.45 As such, aced with the physical presence o an unamiliar person, it was not a question o deciphering their true sel or authentic person but rather o discerning rom which amily or house they came. It was a case o identiying thesigns that showed their rank and i they were allowed to carry these signs de iure.46 Tis was in order to prevent raud and cases o alse identity, something that wasliable to afect courtly, community and amily relationships.47 Tis concern was




writ large at the end o the Middle Ages and beginnings o the modern period, aresult o the increased mobility o populations towards the towns and cities andtheir inability to become inserted in the diferent social strata that made up theseurban centres.48 Te upsurge in vagabonds, wanderers, indigents and oreigners

placed outside the social networks o dependency converted these people whohad no outwards signs o identity into threats to the established order.

At the same time, artistic creation – with the Baroque predilection ordeception and masquerade – in the orm o the short novel49 and popular ormso theatre played with these perormances (the king disguised as a beggar, the

prince as a savage and the rich man as a vagabond), with the result that the socialorder was momentarily upset only to revert to normality at the end o the piece.In this context we can understand what Greenblatt has called ‘cross-dressedtheatre’ with ample displays o cross-dressing and cross-coupling.50 Having beeninitiated in Italy, this variety o comedy enjoyed extraordinary success in Spainin the Golden Age, where the woman disguised as a man became the dominantexpression o the phenomenon rather than the reverse.51 Tis ‘emale to male’

preerence has been understood as part o the teleological order whereby thedynamism o Nature would always tend towards perection, understood as themasculine orm.52 As we will argue later, this transvested theatre would alsounction with a degree o ambivalence. It reinorced the sex/gender hierarchy,as everything eventually returned to its place; but at the same time, as the arti-ciality and the contingency o this order was exposed or all to see, it could also

contribute to its subversion.A similar experience o rupture or disturbance can be seen in those cases o hermaphrodite persons or changes o sex. In these circumstances, the determina-tion o maleness or emaleness by the amily or by those authorities implicatedin the case (such as midwives, doctors, judges and bishops) did not depend onany supposed deep-down real sex but on the conrmation o rank, dress andthe occupation that the individual could legitimately assume.53 In this sense,the physical aspects o a particular body unctioned as a sign o rank and not asmerely biological attributes. Te act, inscribed in the tradition o Roman law, o assigning the ‘predominant sex’ rather than the ‘true sex’ o the newborn her-maphrodite individual obeyed this kind o concern: to determine the rank o the

person, their prerogatives and associated obligations.54

Te body, thereore, at a time when there was still no obvious schism between popular and elite culture, was not understood as a biological reality tout court oras a separate sphere separating the sel rom the rest o the world. As the ‘gro-tesque body’ explored by Bakhtin indicates, this was an exteriorized reality, amicrocosmos linked to a macrocosmos through lines o inuence and preer-ences and dislikes.55 It unctioned as a text where divine design or the honour o lineage could be read.



Introduction 9

Te uidity and changeability o this body, whose sex could be transormedas a consequence o an abrupt shi in the person’s activity or work, was suchthat change o sex, bearded women and menstruating or lactating men could alloccur. Such phenomena occurred as an expression o divine will whose omnipo-tent power was capable o moulding the individual accordingly. Tere was noontological discontinuity between the physical hermaphrodite (in some sense,arguably the intersexual o today) and the social hermaphrodite (again, in somerespects, the transvestite or transsexual).56 In this sense, these cases were ‘marvels’(mirabilia),57 strange occurrences that certainly deviated rom the normal ordero Nature ( praeternaturalia) but which could not be understood as being againstNature (contra natura). Indeed, as we will see, a signicant section o Iberianthought in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries understood these intermedi-ate beings not as monstrosities but as possibilities perectly within the broaddynamics o a prolic and diverse expression o Nature.

However, any ambiguity and mobility between the sexes was subject at thesame time to severe restriction. God had wanted two sexes to exist in humans inorder to guarantee procreation. Te task o the civil and religious authorities wasto watch over the border between the sexes and to set out the criteria whereby any one intermediary individual could participate in both sexes. Tese sameauthorities would also attempt to dissuade and to punish those who attemptedto transgress those established limits by making ambiguity a modus vivendi. Forthis reason, it was not uncommon that at the time o the Counter-Reormation

hermaphroditism and sex change came to be associated with sodomy as thecounter-natural activity par excellence.58 In these cases, what are invoked are notthe marvels that exalt divine power, but the malecence (magicus) inherent tothese events, signs o sin or a warning o danger to come.

But any more or less natural or preternatural instance o mirabilis and coun-ter-natural magicus is only part o what the ambiguous body could represent. Athird type o experience that was doubtless less requent nevertheless draws onthe same idea o metamorphosis and sexual ambivalence. Tis was the miracu-lus, a supernatural intervention that departed rom the normal course o Natureand presented a salvationist message. Te miraculus could include saints whochanged sex as a result o divine intervention, the nal resurrection o womenconverted into men and, on a diferent level, the invocation o the androgynous

as a symbol o perection uniting two contrary tendencies.59

How these categories operated in the context o the medical and juridical dis-

course on hermaphroditism and sex change in Spain over the period rom 1500until the beginning o the eighteenth century is examined in Chapter 1. Chapter2 examines the question o hermaphroditism in cases selected in particular romthe ‘New World’, but with an emphasis on the tra c o ideas between Spain andthe Latin American colonies. Chapter 3 ocuses on the decline o the ‘one-sex’




model and the disruptions – and surprising reversals – that this perormed inknowledge on hermaphrodites in the eighteenth century in a Spanish context.In the ollowing chapter, Chapter 4, we shi our ocus to Portugal, and throughthe examination o a number o diferent cases and the theological, medical and

juridical treatises o the time, we provide a broad analysis o sex change and her-maphroditism in this country and the diferences in comparison to Spain andEurope more generally. In our Conclusion, we suggest similarities and difer-ences across Iberia with respect to historical accounts o hermaphroditism andsummarize the signicance o our ndings or the history o hermaphroditismin Europe rom the sixteenth to the eighteenth century.

Documents

Introduction to Sex, Identity and Hermaphrodites in Iberia, 1500-1800