ABSTRACT
Early moderns understood masculinity (and gender roles more broadly) to be, as her title suggests, mercurial. The line between the sexed bodies of men and women was indeed a contested borderland; that boundary has been transgressed repeatedly in a manner that has proven problematic many times. After a brief rundown of early modern gender norms and an equally pithy exposition of the multiple exceptions to these rules, she continues her analysis. Transgressions of all sorts, like bodies crossing the sex line, purposeful masquerade, homosexual interaction, and the slippage between the intimate and the erotic, were extremely common and often unremarkable. The monster that was the hermaphrodite was not only prevalent but served to remind that, “difference and resemblance were two sides of the same coin.”
