ABSTRACT
In Renaissance France, long before the debates over sex and gender, there was sexe, a term which largely encompassed both those postmodern concepts. In an era obsessed with the (re-)establishment of “natural law,” the distinction between the natural/biological and the cultural was not evident; in fact, theologians and jurists often deliberately effaced the line that separated the two.1 In medical and alchemical treatises, the instability of the term sexe becomes apparent, particularly when hermaphrodites and other individuals “change” their sex. The very existence of the hermaphrodite challenges the neatly delineated dual-sex system, according to which one has to be either male or female. Still, jurists and medical authors alike try to impose one sex, male or female, even on the hermaphrodite. In so doing, they bring the concept of sex into direct confrontation with a body that does not conform to that concept. This confrontation reveals the “imaginary” nature of this culture’s concept of sex, bringing it closer to our postmodern notion of gender.2 The “imaginary” nature of early modern sex designations also leaves a space for fluidity of gender roles, at least in literary and philosophical works, the latter including not only reworkings of Platonic and Neoplatonic texts, but also what is now designated as “philosophical” alchemy. In these works, men and women change their sex at will – or against their will – or disguise it; they conjoin and share their sexed identities, to form a more perfect, hermaphroditic, whole. All this directly violates the “natural laws” separating and distinguishing the sexes, laws imposed by Church and State. Thus, the codification of sex roles seems contemporaneously accompanied by subversion of those very roles. The insistence upon the naturalness of these roles is accompanied by the suggestion that they are not natural.
