Early Modern Hermaphrodites: Sex and Other Stories - Reviews - Book Review

Contemporary Review, Sept, 2002

Early Modern Hermaphrodites: Sex and Other Stories. Ruth Gilbert. Palgrave [pounds sterling]45.00. 214 pages. ISBN 0-333-92537-8. This book, which has grown up out of a doctoral thesis, begins its survey in the seventeenth century and concentrates on Britain. The author seeks to show that 'hermaphroditism has a more complex history than many suspect'.

She includes in her survey not just those who were said to be physically hermaphrodites but the sexually indeterminate. Such sexual indeterminacy 'has always generated confused responses'. The biological hermaphrodite, a person who has 'functional doubled genitalia', has, she writes, probably never existed. The source of the legends and tales has been people with physically ambiguous sexual development or those who, in modern slang, were 'cross-dressers'. The author goes beyond this to see in her topic insights into the 'relationships between sex, gender and sexuality in the early modern period'. By the middle of the eighteenth century the hermaphrodite was no l onger based in mythology or art but was now examined scientifically as a curiosity of nature. To the author, this period's coming to terms with hermaphrodites tells our generation a great deal about our ancestors' views of gender and identity. To future generations this book will also illustrate the transformation of sexual curiosity into an academic discipline.