Erecting Sex: Hermaphrodites and the Medieval Science of Surgery

This essay focuses on “hermaphrodites” and the emerging profession of surgery in thirteenth-and fourteenth-century Europe. During this period, surgeons made novel claims about their authority to regulate sexual difference by surgically “correcting” errant sexual anatomies. Their theories about sex, I argue, drew upon both ancient roots and contemporary conflicts to conceptualize sexual difference in ways that influenced Western Europe for centuries thereafter. I argue that a close examination of medieval surgical texts complicates orthodox narratives in the broader history of sex and sexuality: medieval theorists approached sex in sophisticated and varied manners that belie any simple opposition of modern and premodern paradigms. In addition, because surgical treatments of hermaphrodites in the Middle Ages prefigure in many ways the treatment of atypical sex (a condition now called, controversially, intersex or disorders/differences of sex development) in the modern world, I suggest that the writings of medieval surgeons have the potential to provide new perspectives on our current debates about surgery and sexual difference.