Leah DeVun, "Erecting Sex: Hermaphrodites and the Medieval Science of Surgery," Osiris 30:1, Scientific Masculinities (2015): 17-37.
This essay focuses on “hermaphrodites” and the emerging profession of surgery in thirteenth- and fourteenth- century Europe. During this period, surgeons made novel claims about their authority to regulate sexual difference by surgically “correcting” errant sexual anatomies. Their theories about sex, I argue, drew upon both ancient roots and contemporary conflicts to conceptualize sexual difference in ways that influenced Western Europe for centuries thereafter. I argue that a close examination of medieval surgical texts complicates orthodox narratives in the broader history of sex and sexuality: medieval theorists approached sex in sophisticated and varied
manners that belie any simple opposition of modern and premodern paradigms. In addition, because surgical treatments of hermaphrodites in the Middle Ages prefigure in many ways the treatment of atypical sex (a condition now called, controversially, intersex or disorders/differences of sex development) in the modern world, I suggest that the writings of medieval surgeons have the potential to provide new perspectives on our current debates about surgery and sexual difference.
The Jesus Hermaphrodite:
Science and Sex Difference in Premodern Europe
Leah DeVun
In Book IV of Ovid’s Metamorphoses , a love struck water nymph named Salmacis attempts to seduce Hermaphroditus, the son of Hermes and Aphrodite, at the edge of her fountain.
Despite the youth’s apparent lack of interest, Salmacis follows him into the water, forcibly kissing and fondling him. When he rejects her advances, she asks the gods to join them forever.The result is a single creature of fused male and female body parts:As when one grafts a twig on some tree,he sees the branches grow one,and with common life come to maturity,so were these two bodies knit in close embrace:they were no longer two, nor such as to be called, one, woman,and one, man. They seemed neither, and yet both.
Leah DeVun
In Book IV of Ovid’s Metamorphoses , a love struck water nymph named Salmacis attempts to seduce Hermaphroditus, the son of Hermes and Aphrodite, at the edge of her fountain.
Despite the youth’s apparent lack of interest, Salmacis follows him into the water, forcibly kissing and fondling him. When he rejects her advances, she asks the gods to join them forever.The result is a single creature of fused male and female body parts:As when one grafts a twig on some tree,he sees the branches grow one,and with common life come to maturity,so were these two bodies knit in close embrace:they were no longer two, nor such as to be called, one, woman,and one, man. They seemed neither, and yet both.
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