The Catalan Hermaphrodite and the Inquisition: Early Modern Sex and Gender on Trial

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This book examines the life of Maria Duran, who was born with female genitalia, but was accused of being a man and subsequently put on trial for sorcery by the Portuguese Inquisition during the 18th century. Franois Soyer uses Marias story to open a window onto the world of the experience of transing gender, as well as the gendered attitudes and responses to the transgression of gendered norms that were adopted by churchmen, medical practitioners and ordinary lay men and women. Drawing on the surviving (and staggeringly 736-page long) sorcery trial dossier, Soyer analyses the secretive life of an individual who actively and deliberately transed gender. The dossier analysis enables insights into aspects of life so rarely recorded in early modern documents: the transgression of gender norms, transgressive sexuality and sexual violence in female religious institutions, in addition to the fears and debates about the power that the Devil could wield over the human body. The Catalan Hermaphrodite and the Inquisition also reveals how the Inquisition gathered a number of doctors, surgeons and midwives to conduct careful examinations of Marias body in general and genitals in particular. Their reports and the discussions of the inquisitors are discussed by Soyer and offer further fascinating evidence of attitudes towards sex and gender in early modern Europe.

Reviews

This is a book one cannot put down! Soyers narrative of this extraordinary case reads as a thrilling mystery novel; the construction of the characters is flawless, the telling of the story spell-binding, the most brilliant example of microhistory since Ginzburgs The Cheese and the Worms * Marta V. Vicente, Associate Professor at the Departments of History and Women and Gender and Sexuality Studies, University of Kansas, USA *

Author Bio

Franois Soyer is Associate Professor at the University of New England, Australia. He is the author of several books, including Antisemitic Conspiracy Theories in the Early Modern Iberian World (2019) and Ambiguous Gender in Early Modern Spain and Portugal (2012). He is also the co-editor of Emotions in Europe 15171914: Revolutions, 17151789 (2021) and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.