The hermaphroditi, a challenge to the order of the body in the western Middle Ages

Article by Sandra Alvarez published on the Medievalists.net (Canada) website, freely translated by Flavia Piepoli

In a fascinating article entitledHermaphrodix in the western Middle Ages: Physicians, Lawyers and the Incersexed Person(Hermaphroditism in the western Middle Ages: doctors, lawyers and the intersex individual), the historic Irina Metzler examined the opinions of the present and the Middle Ages on the intersex.

What did the law say?

The number one concern of ecclesiastics, jurists and ordinary people was the risk of social deviance. "Instead of an aberrant physiology, what medieval reporters most frightened was the possibility of aberrant sexuality, in this case homosexual behavior."

Unlike current times, in which an operation is decided by parents and health professionals at the time of birth, in the Middle Ages the intersex individual could choose the sex that most agreed to him. However, if he had diverted from his choice, he risked the accusation of homosexual relationships and could go against the law. Despite his decision, according to the scholar Miri Rubin in the articleThe person in the form: Medieval Challenges to Bodily Order(The individual in the figure: challenges to the order of the body in the Middle Ages), the choice was "Set from a heterosexual orientation".

If you chose to be a man, you had to mate with a woman and vice versa to avoid accusations of sexual deviance. However, sex could also be assigned to birth. According to Michel Foucault, often the godfather assigned sex to infant at the time of baptism. Once the child had reached the age of majority and was ready for the wedding, he had the opportunity to decide whether to remain with the sex assigned to him at birth. At that point he could change but then he had to remain in the final choice to avoid any fear about deviance. Nonetheless, if the intersex individual had not been able to fulfill the marital debt, the spouse was allowed to dissolve the marriage bond.

Punishment for deviance could be very severe. In 1281, an Alsazian hermaphrodite woman was made blind because she had tried to force another woman to have sex. Once again, the repugnant act was the idea that a woman was acting like a man, not the aggression itself.

What did the Church say?

The fears of ecclesiastics focused on the impossibility of hermaphrodes to consume marriage. In canon law it was important for a married couple to conceive and consume their union. The concern of sexual deviance and the prohibition against homosexual behavior by legislators echoed among the canonists. The theologian Pietro Cantore (1197 m) wrote on the hermaphrodite:
“There will be no relationships of men with men or women with women, but only men with women and vice versa. For this reason, the Church allows an hermaphrodite - that is, someone with organs of both sexes, capable of both active and passive functions - to use the organ with which he (or her) is mostly excited or that he (or her) is more susceptible ... If, however, he (or her) should fail with one organ, the use of the other can never be granted, but he will have to remain celibate to avoid of inversion of sodomy, hated by God. "

In the eyes of the Church as in the eyes of the law, a sex had to always prevail. Again, the key point was not so much the physical plan as the social problems that intersex individuals posed to the public decoration and the defense of medieval "norms".

Intersexuality: medieval opinion

Rubin also reported that the hermaphrodite were often mentioned in medieval beasts, "This legend was transmitted in medieval bestiari and in texts based on the legend of Isidoro, such as the De Monstis of the twelfth century, in which the androgynous and 'are described:' It was read and written of a miserable prodigy of a common or mixed genre. He reproduces, as a father and as a mother, generating a single creature that has both male and female components in the same way ".

The intersex individuals were seen as monstrous and, among ordinary people, generally avoided. Every deviance from God was considered a monstrosity. In City of God (the city of God), Sant'Agostino (354-430) includes hermaphrodes on the list of monstrosities. The medieval French poet Eustache Deschamps (1340-1406) went further and wrote an accusatory work entitledContre les hemaphrodites(Against hermaphrodes):

“A soft chin, hermaphrodite son
Effeminate, a defect of nature,
Weak heart, without any virtue,
But full of vices, which tends towards anything but obscenity ...
A woman in a man, who should be bearded,
Man without hair, it is an insult for anyone.
Meeting them is nothing but misfortune,
And their gaze cannot please anyone.
They make sexual use of both genres,
I met them in my time
Unreliable, unfair, evil "

Medieval medical explanation: what were the causes of armafroditism?

There were several curious medieval theories at the origin of this condition. A popular belief was the seven -cell uterus. It was believed that the uterus had two cavities composed of three compartments on each side. One side housed three warmer sections, which were male, while the other side contained three colder, feminine sections. In the center there was a remaining cavity, neither male nor female, and hermaphrodite was created in this seventh cell.

Another explanation of medieval medical practitioners was that the origin of the sperm - the right or left testicle - determined the sex of the child. If the sperm of the left testicle had gone to the right side of the uterus, a "mainly" woman would have been. If the sperm of the right testicle had ended up on the left side of the uterus, he would have produced an effective man.

The intersex individuals were seen as a threat to the social order and their bodies had to be controlled. Even the "rational" medical explanations did not make intersection acceptable as third sex in the order of the medieval world. The ecclesiastics, jurists and the people of the Middle Ages expected that the intersex individual would fit into the appropriate "box" to continue working in society.

Original text: Incersex in the middle Ages