ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests that unstable bodies of this period, bodies in transition or in states that defied convention, may have had a value beyond horror or monstrosity. It is about what men, or bodies perceived to be male, can and cannot be, can and cannot do according to certain arbiters of gender in early modern France. Tesserant's dramatic text is preceded, however, by an intriguing woodcut of the strangely coiffed man. Boaistuau's text includes several illustrations of hermaphroditic monsters, as do other such works Ambroise Par's Des Monstres et prodiges, for example, which borrows a great number of its illustrations from Boaistuau. Several of the early modern depictions that Gubar explores show an infant Judas sprung from his bowels and received by Satan as midwife. The story that Thomas Artus's island explorer confronts on the tapestry that both shrouds and explicates the mysteries of hermaphrodism through the example of Heliogabalus is horrific.
