Becoming an Onion: The Extra-Human Nature of Genital Difference in the Old English Riddling and Medical Traditions

Abstract

This essay addresses the means by which the male genital organs register—that is, effectively become present, meaningful, and functional (or dysfunctional)—in early medieval culture by examining sexual riddles from the Exeter Book and aphrodisiac remedies from the Medicina de Quadrupedibus. Both function within a very particular material-discursive network governing the understanding and experience of genitals during this period. Reading these texts together suggests that gender is at this time not understood as a system existing in relation to biological sex, in which genitals are understood as relatively inert signifiers of a physical difference that is coterminous with the human body itself. In fact, both the riddles and aphrodisiac remedies suggest that the penis becomes most completely itself—or becomes restored most completely to itself and capable of fremmanne or donne, performing or doing its sexual, reproductive function—only when in an assemblage with animal and sometimes plant matter. The male sexual organ is thus far from being a discretely bounded entity lending ontological weight to sexual difference, but is in fact an entity which comes into being only in a form distributed across the human and non-human spectrum.

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