This post includes antiquated and offensive language.
The Newberry’s eighteenth century Heylwagen manuscript has been abuzz with interest since its acquisition in 2021. Cornelius Heylwagen (or Heilwagen, ca. 1702–after 1764), was a German merchant who journeyed around Western Europe during his youth, bringing with him a manuscript codex that collected friends’ signatures, poems, written remembrances, and small painted mementos. Other blog posts have explored how this album amicorum—or friendship album—is akin to today’s social media (Fig. 1).
New discoveries in the Heylwagen manuscript go even deeper than the merchant’s boisterous adventures and amorous dalliances. A poem within the manuscript, likely penned by one of Heylwagen’s friends, even touches on early modern German understandings of “hermaphrodites,” or people who today we would term as being intersex (Figs. 2, 3).
In German this poem reads:
Über die Hermaphroditen / Wird von langer Zeit geschrieben / Ob sie jemahl auf die Welt / sich wahrhaftig dargestellt. / Doch wann jemand den Venette / Einmal nicht gelesen hätte / dieser greif der Wahnsinn / Nur nach ihren Reifrock hin, / So wird er als bald erfahren / daß auch Weiber Männer waren.
A translation preserving the original rhyme reads:
About hermaphrodites, it has long been asked / for ages long in stories past / whether they ever truly walked upon the earth / and if such beings ever had their birth / but if one has the author Venette / not quite encountered yet / then surely he will be distressed / when he looks up a lady’s dress / as then he will understand / that women too can be man.
Bawdy, yes. By suggesting that readers can locate intersex people by peeking up women’s skirts, the author engenders a culture of sexual assault and trivializes human sexual heterogeneity. Yet one phrase within the poem— “if one has the author Venette / not quite encountered yet” —suggests that the poem’s author was, in fact, familiar with new scientific literature that situated intersex individuals in everyday life in European society.
Nicholas Venette (1633–1698) was a French physician and one of the first Western sexologists (Fig. 4). His medical guide Tableau de l'amour considere dans l'estat du marriage (1686) offered married couples, in its first three sections, guidance on common sexual and reproductive issues. The book’s fourth section deals with less common issue, especially sexual impotence and ambiguity in the traditionally binary sexing of individuals. Within this last section of his book, Venette discusses the lived realities of people such as eunuchs and “hermaphrodites.”
The term “hermaphrodite,” which denoted individuals at once both fully physiologically male and female, has no medical analog today. Indeed, the word has been expunged from medical literature and is viewed as offensive and antiquated. The closest modern equivalents to the term "hermaphrodite" are intersex peoples, or individuals with biological characteristics that do not match cultural expectations regarding male and female bodies, including variations in sex chromosomes, external genitalia, or internal reproductive systems.
“Hermaphrodites” long existed as an Other within the European imagination. Hermaphroditus, born two-sexed, was the mythical child of Hermes and Aphrodite, and the figure reemerged in the medieval period in bestiaries such as the English Marvels of the East (ca. 1000, see the Newberry’s reproduction) (Fig. 5). These early texts depicted hermaphrodites as “monsters” best catalogued alongside hippopods (or peoples with horses’ hooves), unicorns, and phoenixes. Clearly the Marvels of the East acknowledged the existence of hermaphrodites while insisting that such individuals lived far to the East and certainly not in Christian Western Europe.
By the sixteenth century, so-called “Books of Wonder” insisted that the births of hermaphrodites were signs of divine displeasure and omens of impending natural disaster. In the seventeenth century, hermaphroditism was also increasingly linked with non-physical, gender-defying characteristics such as promiscuity, effeminacy, and homosexuality. It is telling that individuals transgressing such societal norms were linked with the previous era’s monsters.
Expanding geographic and epistemological boundaries during the early modern period, especially following the Age of Discovery, led to more accurate understandings of human sexual heterogeneity. Through early scientific texts such as those by Nicholas Venette, hermaphrodites—or intersex peoples—came to be viewed as not as marvels located in the distant East but rather as individuals living and existing in Western Europe. A momentous change from the medieval period indeed!
In these swirling, changing conceptions of sexual and gender norms in the early modern period, the Heylwagen manuscript marks a breakthrough moment. In the poem within this manuscript, we see that knowledge about heterogeneous sexual characteristics percolated from scholars such as Venette to young German students and merchants traveling through Europe. The status and safety of intersex people in the West was, and is, precarious and intersex peoples today still face stigmatization and discrimination. Yet in the Heylwagen manuscript we see a subtle shift in popular opinion about the everyday existence of intersex people in Europe. No longer at the margins of the European imagination, such individuals lived within society, and this long road to acceptance continues today.
About the Author
Trevor Brandt is a PhD candidate in Art History at the University of Chicago researching early modern German and German-American print culture and folk art, and a former Newberry Library intern. Trevor serves as managing editor of Americana Insights.