CHAPTER TWO

INQUISITORS AND

The figure of the occupied a position in early modern European culture that was out of all proportion to the small number of individuals whose existence is recorded in extant documents. Hermaphrodites transcended the accepted binary division of society between males and and as such provoked a wide range of reac- tions that included curiosity, disgust, horror and entertainment. The image of the hermaphrodite was frequently deployed in works of litera- ture and was even adopted as a useful tool in early modern political pro- paganda. In one of his acerbic attacks on the Papal curia written in 1545, for instance, Martin Luther described the High Pontiff and his entourage as a troupe of “hermaphrodites and sodomites”. The figure of the her- maphrodite was used in a similar fashion for polemical purposes in France during the latter half of the sixteenth century. During the bitter civil wars that tore France apart in this period, the propagandists serving the ene- mies of King Henri III (1574–1589) initiated a very carefully orchestrated campaign of character assassination whose aim was to ridicule the French monarch by presenting him as sexually ambiguous character.1 Official and unofficial reactions to individuals presenting ambiguous genitalia in France during the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth cen- turies were often characterised by an element of incomprehension, and an acute fear that such individuals would exploit their position to flout laws regulating the sacrament of and same- relations.2 Many authorities did not admit the existence of hermaphrodites but rather insisted that such individuals were “pseudo-hermaphrodites”, an expres- sion used to designate individuals who engaged in transvestism. The burning of a hermaphrodite named Antide Collas in Dole in eastern France in 1599 was probably characteristic of the fate of many such indi- viduals. Antide was examined by doctors who pronounced him/her to be

1 Martin Luther, Werke (Weimar, 1883), vol. 54, 282; On hermaphrodites in France and England see R. Gilbert, Hermaphrodites in Early Modern Europe (Basingstoke, 2002) and K. P. Long, Hermaphrodites in Renaissance Europe (Aldershot, 2006). 2 L. Daston and K. Park, “Hermaphrodites in Renaissance France”, Critical Matrix: Princeton Working Papers in Women’s Studies, 1 (1985), 1–19. inquisitors and hermaphrodites 51 a hermaphrodite and subsequently forced to confess, under duress, that he/she had concluded a pact with the Devil.3 Another celebrated case was that of Martin/Marie Le Macis, a hermaphrodite residing in Rouen under the identity of a . When he/she was discovered, Martin/Marie Le Macis only narrowly escaped a death sentence for lesbianism in 1601 due to the personal intervention of Doctor Jacques Duval, who wrote a cele- brated account of his/her case and a treatise on hermaphrodites.4 Martin/ Marie Le Macis appears to have been extremely fortunate to cheat death. The early eighteenth-century antiquarian Henri Sauval reported the case of two hermaphrodites, who were allegedly lovers, residing in Paris in 1603. Sauval recorded, admittedly without providing much detail that would help confirm the veracity of this incident, that both hermaphro- dites were put on trial and swiftly sentenced to death when their ambigu- ous gender and sexuality were uncovered.5 From the middle of the seventeenth-century, the authorities in France appear to have been less inclined to punish such ambiguous indivi­ duals and more concerned to fix them within an established . It is particularly striking in the case of Marguerite Malaure, a woman from Toulouse in southern France suffering from a protuberant pro­lapsed uterus who came to the attention of the authorities. Her ail- ment was initially misdiagnosed as a malformed and this caused her to be declared a male-dominant hermaphrodite in 1686. Accordingly, Marguerite was compelled to adopt a male identity, complete with the male name of Arnaud. She was eventually forced to seek legal redress to recuperate her identity. Just as revealing is the case of Jean-Baptiste Grandjean. Born in Grenoble in 1732 and initially baptised as a girl, Grandjean was forced to become a man at when his penis devel- oped and he demonstrated a marked sexual preference for women. Although his penis was capable of and ejaculated semen, Grandjean was infertile. Denounced to the authorities by his discontented wife in 1761, a physical examination by surgeons concluded that there were enough signs of female genitals to declare that his predominant sex was female. Grandjean was consequently ordered to live as a woman and

3 M. Foucault, Abnormal: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1974–1975 (London, 2003), 67. 4 L. Daston and K. Pack, “The Hermaphrodite and the Orders of Nature: sexual ambiguity in early modern France”, Gays and Lesbians Quarterly, 1 (1995), 419–438; K. P. Long, Hermaphrodites in Renaissance Europe, 80–4. 5 H. Sauval, Histoire et recherches des Antiquités de la ville de Paris (Paris, 1724), Vol. II, 567.