Der Hermaphrodit und seine Frau. Körper, Sexualität und Geschlecht im Spätmittelalter

Abstract

Ambigous, ‚hermaphroditic‘ bodies are liminal bodies, making visible what normally remains invisible, namely, the construction of sex and gender. For the Middle Ages, the history of intersex cannot be written on the basis of medical and legal texts, even less so than for other periods. Narrative sources from the late Middle Ages display a strikingly sober tone when reporting on ambigous bodies, even in cases of people who were married first as women and consecutively as men. Even in polemic usage, ‚hermaphroditism‘ referred to failed masculinity (denoting effeminacy), but not specifically to sexual deviance. Contrary to what has been thought, it does denote sodomy, and there is no primary source evidence for the assumed persecution of intersex people in the Middle Ages. This all should not be seen as evidence for ‚tolerance‘ or Laqueur’s ‚one sex model‘; rather, it indicates relatively low requirements for masculinity in general and for getting married in particular. Medieval marriage had, in historical perspective, rather low barriers, and did not require anatomically unambiguous bodies; for this very reason, it was an institution apt to produce unambiguous genders. This changed dramatically in the sixteenth century, and the figure of the ‚hermaphrodite‘ became increasingly sexualised, as access to marriage became more restricted, demands on masculinity were rising, and sodomy was re-defined as gender-symmetrical.

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