Kathleen Long

Hermaphrodites in Renaissance Europe

Contents: Introduction: Sex and gender wars Sexual dissonance: early modern scientific accounts of hermaphrodism The cultural and medical construction of gender: Caspar Bauhin Jacques Duval on hermaphrodites: culture wars in the medical profession Hermetic hermaphrodites Gender and power in the alchemical works of Clovis Hesteau de Nuysement Lyric hermaphrodites The royal hermaphrodite: Henri III of France Hermaphrodites newly discovered: the cultural monsters of early modern France Conclusion Bibliography Index.

High anxiety : masculinity in crisis in early modern France

This collection explores the evolution of notions about masculinity during the intense crisis of Renaissance and early modern France. Authors of the period reflect the anxieties about masculinity that became more pronounced against the backdrop of major events and innovations of the period: the religious conflict in France, the repeated questioning of religious and royal authority, the revival of Greek scepticism, the discovery of the New World, and the rise of clinical medicine. These events in turn fuelled growing doubt concerning the fixed and hierarchical nature of gender distinction; a distinction upon which many felt French culture was dependent for its very survival.

Cruelty and Empathy in Théodore Agrippa d’Aubigné’s Les Tragiques : The Gaze of and on the Reader

Theodore Agrippa d’Aubigne’s representations of cruelty in his epic about the Wars of Religion in France, Les Tragiques, function within the frame of a relationship between the authorial persona and a reader based on manipulation and even interrogation of the reader’s motives. While this cruelty might function as a spur to empathy, forcing the reader to face and at least try to understand the suffering of the victims of war and of religious persecution, it also evokes the possibility of vengeance and thus of continued violence. This strategy is supported by calculated perversion of some of the most cherished literary forms of the period, in particular Petrarchan poetry and classical epic. Agrippa d’Aubigne creates certain expectations by the use of well-known Petrarchan and epic images and forms, and then destroys those expectations by twisting the images and forms to very different uses. In this way, the reader is continually kept off balance, shocked, and perhaps even distressed by what she reads. In the end, by acting in what seems to be an inhumane manner toward his reader, Agrippa d’Aubigne may be revealing an “ethics of affect” in his reader, inculcating empathy through shared suffering and vulnerability. Nonetheless, in the context of the Wars of Religion, the limitations of this empathy must be recognized. The reader is thus left with the choice to be cruel or to be kind.

Montaigne, Monsters, and Modernity

Twenty original perspectives on such authors as Marguerite de Navarre, Rabelais, Montaigne, Marot, Labe, and Helisenne de Crenne, as well as on less familiar works of religious polemics, emblems, cartography, geomancy, bibliophilism, and ichthyology.

What Came Before, What Comes After Normal? Some Humanist and Postmodern Antihumanist Thoughts on the Concept of Normalcy

From Aristotle through Augustine to the present day, ideas concerning what is natural, normal, and universal remain entangled with each other as well as with the concepts of the unnatural, monstrous, and particular. Philosophy wrestles with various systems of organization in the attempt to master knowledge of human life in all of its variations. While antihumanist thought, particularly the work of Georges Canguilhem and Michel Foucault, offers crucial criticism of post-Enlightenment rational humanism’s construction of normalcy, a dialogue with early modern humanism, and the work of Michel de Montaigne in particular, reveals that alternatives to this normalizing view of humanity existed before antihumanism.