ABSTRACT
The end of the sixteenth century in Europe saw the publication of a number of treatises revolving around male and female anatomy, sex, sexuality, and childbirth; three of these treatises in particular use the hermaphrodite, or, more generally monsters, as an enticement to potential readers, and thus link the ambiguously sexed body to more common experiences of sex and sexuality: Paré’s Des Monstres et prodiges, as we have seen; Bauhin’s De Hermaphroditorum monstrosorumque partuum natura; and Duval’s Des Hermaphrodits et accouchements des femmes. These treatises reflect a gradual evolution in thought concerning the body, sex, sexuality, and cultural attitudes towards gender. In Bauhin’s treatise, unlike Paré’s, the proliferation of cultural sources (literary, philosophical, theological, and legal) on hermaphrodism exists in tension with a more empirical approach to science. Bauhin was a professor of anatomy and botany at Basel in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.1 Clearly, he was fascinated by the question of sexual difference, and wrote not only his treatise on hermaphrodites, but one on the distinguishing features of male and female human anatomy, Institutiones anatomicae corporis virilis et muliebris historiam exhibentes.2 His treatise, De Hermaphroditorum, apparently first published in Frankfurt in 1600, and then in Oppenheim in 1614 (with engravings taken from various works by Theodor de Bry), offers the most complete evidence of the cultural status of the hermaphrodite in the late Renaissance. In his twenty-five page long list of works cited in his treatise (given at the opening of the edition), Bauhin provides the most complete bibliographical source for every type of account of hermaphrodism, and a summary of much of the material available to Renaissance intellectuals.
