The Shape of Sex: Nonbinary Gender from Genesis to the Renaissance

Abstract

Leah DeVun's The Shape of Sex: Nonbinary Gender from Genesis to the Renaissance offers a critical new study on the premodern (200–1400 CE) occupation with theorizing, categorizing, and representing bodies that did not conform to a given period's normative definitions of sex and gender. DeVun (pronoun: they) convincingly argues that, far from a fringe interest reserved for obscure theorists, discussions of what constituted a nonbinary body, and even a “human” body, were at the fore of the larger debate over what separated humans from “other” beings. This discourse often employed the concept of the nonbinary figure, or “hermaphrodite,” as period sources called it, to distinguish the “ideal” human—namely, the white European Christian—from figures or ideas that strayed from this type, including the aligning of hermaphrodites with “others,” such as racialized monsters, Jews, and intersex individuals.The consequences of these categories were far-reaching: they not only informed the textual and visual representation of these figures (both real and imagined) but also had tangible consequences for the individuals whose lives were directly impacted by religious, legal, and medical doctrines seeking to exclude them from society or change their physical appearance to better fit within the male-female binary. Yet, as DeVun notes, these categories were not monolithic, nor did they represent a neat linear progression of development over time. Rather, they were informed by several religious, political, scientific, and social factors that continued to ebb and flow across the premodern period leading to the Renaissance. As a result, the period covered by this book represents a complex and often contradictory engagement with the idea of nonbinary sex, one that some readers may be surprised to learn occasionally allowed for a celebratory reading of hermaphroditism as a manifestation of the ideal human-divine figure in Christ.DeVun adopts an interdisciplinary framework, consistent with recent trends in humanities scholarship, that often employs modern feminist, queer, transgender, and postcolonial theories to examine a range of historical documents to present as holistic a view as possible of the broader societal implications for the period of inquiry. In so doing, DeVun draws upon a wide range of textual and visual sources, from court documents and early Christian doctrine to world maps and bestiaries, surgical textbooks, and alchemical treatises.The book's six chapters are organized into a loose chronological arc that charts premodern Europe's engagement with the theme of nonbinary sex from the biblical story of creation in Genesis to the end of time, where one encounters the metaphor of Jesus as an “alchemical hermaphrodite,” an ideal human-divine figure imbued with the capacity to save humanity from the impending apocalypse. As a result, the book necessarily foregrounds Christianity as one of the defining factors that shaped discourses of nonbinary bodies, as it continues to do in our current time. Christianity also facilitates another narrative thread at the heart of DeVun's book, whereby Europeans defined themselves in contrast to their perception of “others” across racial, religious, or anatomical lines. DeVun also explores the impact this belief system had on marginalized people outside Europe, who were subjected to colonial and racist Western imperatives in part through aligning these groups with immoral and unnatural hermaphrodites.Each chapter is grounded in a temporal frame, highlighting an illustration or textual source as the primary case study or point of entry. This structure, at once both chronological and thematic, lays the foundation for DeVun's broader reading of the premodern period as an era whose explorations into hybridity led to the imperative to curtail bodies capable of change or transition, ultimately culminating in an interest in metamorphosis and transformation. Temporally, the chapters rapidly progress from the early Christian period to the medieval, culminating in a brief discussion of early Renaissance (ca. 1500) examples of alchemical treatises in chapter six. Some readers with interests in the early modern era may feel slightly misled by the book's title; the phrase “from Genesis to the Renaissance” implies an exploration of nonbinary gender through the Renaissance, but the study focuses almost entirely on the European medieval period.The first chapter, “The Perfect Sexes of Paradise,” foregrounds the debate over the first human's (i.e., Adam's) status as a “hermaphrodite” and its implications for the concept of resurrection for Christians. An illumination from a fourteenth-century English manuscript, Omne bonum, provides the entry point. DeVun focuses on a historiated initial for the letter “H” for hermaphrodite, which portrays a bicephalic figure, and they suggest that the Janus-like head may visually allude to Adam's sexual duality, whereby the rib from Adam that formed Eve signaled “for some readers … [that] Adam's maleness was inherently joined with femaleness. Some went so far as to claim Adam himself as an ‘androgyne’ or ‘man-woman’” (16). The concept of “Adam as sexually undifferentiated” reflected a late antique theological idea of divine innocence, what DeVun refers to as the “primal androgyne” (17). The chapter culminates with the author's discussion of the two divergent philosophies emerging from the idea of Adam as a representative of pure and undifferentiated sex. Some thinkers rejected the premise and relegated the androgyne to the category of the deviant, while others argued for its status as a human ideal.Chapter 2, “The Monstrous Races: Mapping the Borders of Sex,” extends the influence of Christianity to the equating of racialized “others” with the category of the monstrous. These figures appeared in travelogues and world maps, often within the trope of the “monstrous races,” a topic of inquiry that has received substantial attention since Jeffrey Cohen's 1996 study on monster theory. As in chapter one, DeVun focuses heavily on English and French examples, such as the Hereford Mappa Mundi, ca. 1300, and the well-known manuscript Livre des merveilles (Book of Marvels), gifted to the Duke of Berry in the fifteenth century. Although these works are compelling with regard to the diverse range of images and the depictions of the purportedly monstrous bodies of Ethiopians and Muslims, the reader is left wondering how these attitudes manifested in other regions or centers throughout the West. Also noticeably absent in this chapter is the voice of Surekha Davies, whose 2016 work on ethnographic maps of the New World and monsters in the Renaissance represents a critical intervention in the field of monster studies, for scholars of both pre- and early modern studies.In the third chapter, “The Hyena's Unclean Sex: Beasts, Bestiaries, and Jewish Communities,” DeVun links the discourse of racial difference examined in chapter 2 to religious “others,” particularly through images from the Aberdeen Bestiary, an English manuscript from ca. 1200. In this image, we see a hyena with both male and female genitalia eating the flesh of a presumably Christian body. DeVun interprets these images through the lens of antisemitism, as equating Jews with uncleanliness, gender-crossing, and demonism. This chapter demonstrates that categories of sex difference were defined just as much by behavior as by external appearance and anatomy.“Sex and Order in Natural Philosophy and Law,” the fourth chapter, continues the exploration of the differences between the categories of conforming and nonconforming sex by closely examining how premodern thinkers worked through differences between sexing and gendering the body. This chapter reflects the significant progress scholars of premodern history have made since Thomas Laqueur's seminal and often contested 1990 work Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud, which promoted the idea of the one-sex model. DeVun's chapter collates philosophers' and theorists' debates over the question, “What is human?” (103). Here, the author returns to the classical precedents of Aristotle, Hippocrates, Galen, and, importantly, includes the contribution of Muslim physicians and philosophers such as Ibn Sīnā (980–1037), also known by the Westernized name Avicenna—a figure familiar to scholars of premodern medicine, but probably less so to nonacademic audiences interested in the history of nonbinary gender and sex, for whom this book will likely have great appeal.Chapters 5 and 6 contain the two most compelling case studies and contribute most significantly to the burgeoning field of medieval Transgender Studies. “The Correction of Nature: Sex and the Science of Surgery” explores the practice of thirteenth-century physicians who operated on nonbinary individuals to change their ambiguously sexed bodies into bodies that anatomically conformed to those of “men” and “women.” The goal in these procedures was to “correct nature's mistakes” (143), and to prevent the crossing of regulated boundaries for sex and gender that might allow a nonbinary person to deceive others and occupy multiple roles in sex and gender presentation. It is in this chapter that DeVun most explicitly highlights the limitations of archives, which rarely (if at all) preserve the voice and perspective of the individual. DeVun employs modern transgender theory as an analytical tool by which we can attempt to understand the stories and lives of these people. In so doing, the author adeptly weaves the modern with the premodern, and provides an alternative solution to the dearth of recoverable sources. This approach will undoubtedly provide a model for scholars working in similarly challenging subject areas across the pre- and early modern world.The book's narrative arc culminates in the final chapter, “The Jesus Hermaphrodite: Alchemy in the Late Middle Ages and Early Renaissance.” Here, DeVun examines the potential for transformation and metamorphosis through the concept of the “alchemical hermaphrodite.” The chapter extends their previous work on the subject by focusing on illustrations of nonbinary figures reproduced in alchemical texts, including a version of the illuminated manuscript Aurora Consurgens (Rising Dawn), produced in the 1420s. Interestingly, the manuscript depicts Sapientia or Wisdom as a winged Black Madonna, an observation DeVun mentions only briefly. Although with further exploration, they could have tied the chapter back to previous discussions of race as a form of gendered othering. This chapter is also one of DeVun's most sustained engagements with visual media and includes a section on the broader visual conventions for portraying the hermaphrodite as a “male and female bod[y] fused into a new shape that retained the distinct characteristics of its parts” (175). These Y-shaped depictions drew from both classical (especially Ovid's Metamorphoses) and Christian prototypes, eventually giving way to a reconceptualization of Christ as the ultimate hermaphroditic ideal. The concept of Christ as a figure embodying both male and female traits, including the visual analogy of his wounds to the shape of a vagina and the nurturing or “mothering” of his followers, is not a new premise, having previously been put forth by Caroline Walker Bynum, whom DeVun acknowledges as an influence. In this combination of theological and alchemical contexts, DeVun convincingly argues for the potential capacity of the nonbinary figure to provide a positive ideal for premodern society, which facilitates the transition into early modern modes of thinking through complex and overlapping nonbinary and gender associations.There is much to admire in DeVun's ambitious project. The book has broad appeal, not only for specialists in the history of medieval gender but also for scholars in English, history of medicine, and art history. It is also clear from their “Conclusion: Tension and Tenses” that the work provides an opportunity to engage nonspecialist audiences, inside and outside the classroom. DeVun's study certainly resonates with the increasingly urgent issues surrounding transgender and intersex communities today. In sum, The Shape of Sex presents a critical reconstruction of the categories and boundaries that defined premodern nonbinary sex, and, in so doing, provides a valuable contribution to our understanding of the forces that shaped definitions of humanity, past and present alike.