ABSTRACT
If we accept the premise that the early modern period experienced the world through literature to a considerable extent, then female same-sex relations must have appeared rather rare to many. Personal or fi ctional reports of such are few. If we exclude medical and judicial reports as well as fi ctional treatments that are based on gender error and poems in the Sapphic tradition usually written by male authors (like John Donne’s poem “Sappho to Philaenis”), there is not very much in that period – and that may be an overstatement. Of course, we are here in an area of deliberate obfuscation. Thus, when the important Lusitanian physician publishing in Hamburg, Rodrigo a Castro, wrote his book on women’s diseases De universa mulierum medicina (1603), he included sections on hermaphrodites as well as on different kinds of masturbatores, adding to the latter the disposition that, should his book ever be translated into vernacular languages, this note, since it was addressed to the learned, should not be.1 To my knowledge his book (which went through several editions) was never translated. I will discuss a work that, though published in 1718, appears to include much Renaissance material, although I cannot always prove that now to every one’s satisfaction. Entitled De Hermaphroditis, it was published by the notorious printer Edmund Curll, sometimes called the “abominable” Curll because he had a record of printing works that were considered in the margin of the acceptable (and of going to jail for it). At least since the Renaissance, one of the meanings of the word “hermaphrodite” in nonscientifi c language had been “catamite.”2 Though anonymous and no doubt culled together in the spirit of the time from numerous Renaissance works (sometimes with attributions of the sources, sometimes without), this text is attributed to Giles Jacob (1686-1744), whom the Dictionary of National Biography calls “a most diligent compiler.”
