378
tory section on the heretical tendencies and
alliances of the Paracelsians, p. 28), wherein
it is clear that Paracelsus became regarded
among his followers not as a new Luther,
but rather as a dreimalgroer German 5609 8.
an allusion to Hermes Trismegistus. Actu-
ally, in the CP one can trace Paracelsianism
as it became more and more linked with a
diverse variety of esoteric traditions, such
as Neoplatonism and Cabbalism, and in
an inter-confessional context that included
the tolerance and/or adoption of radical
theological notions, e.g., those of Caspar
Schwenckfeld. An example of a radical
theological dimension is text no. 48 from
Toxites 1571 edition of Paracelsus mag-
num opus, Astronomia Magna, in which
Toxites discusses Paracelsus exceptionally
idiosyncratic and heretical biblical exegesis,
and summarizes Paracelsus unique soterio-
logical system in which the mortal body of
humans (comprised of elemental and side-
real matter) is destined for eternal destruc-
tion with all other elemental and sidereal
corporeality. To provide for the resurrec-
tion body of Christians, Christ in the
new creation created a new body, struggles; the consolidation of royal power
which is received in baptism and nourished
by the eucharist. As Paracelsus elaborates in
the Astronomia Magna, both the eucharist
and resurrection body possess the same
subtle material as the body of Christ, whose
flesh is unlike the mortal flesh of humans.
Reading Toxites, one wonders about the ex-
tent to which the Paracelsians sought to
hide their heretical tendencies. This is only
one of the many questions that scholars will
face when analyzing and interpreting the
wealth of material in the CP.
The second volume of the Corpus Para-
celsisticum is a veritable goldmine. It is a
collection of richly edited texts accompa-
nied by an enlightening introduction and
adroit commentary. The volume is a tre-
mendously significant contribution that will
serve scholars well in their efforts to under-
stand early Paracelsianism and better grasp
the scientific, philosophical, medical, eso-
teric, and religious milieu of the early Scien-
tific Revolution.
DANE T. DANIEL
BOOK REVIEWS
KATHLEEN P. LONG, Hermaphrodites in Re-
naissance Europe: Women and Gender in
the Early Modern World. Aldershot: Ash-
gate, 2006. X+268 pp., ISBN 0-7546
The figure of the hermaphrodite offers a
cluster of attributes that range from the
physical to the metaphysical, posing medi-
cal, legal, and philosophical issues that must
be defined and confronted anew in the dis-
cursive terms available at any particular
time and place; this makes it an ideal object
for interdisciplinary studies. Kathleen Long
offers a series of 8 essays (four of which
have been published in previous versions)
on this theme which appear to have been
written mainly in the 1990s and then some-
what awkwardly connected into a book for
Ashgates series Women and Gender in the
Early Modern World. They focus on the role
hermaphroditic bodies played in the cul-
ture wars of sixteenth-century France, a
time of crises summarized in the introduc-
tion as: the discovery of new world cultures;
the Reformation and its attendant violent
at the expense of traditional feudalism;
and the rise of empirical science, along with
a valorization of clinical practice over book-
ish learning. Each chapter centers around a
different textual genre and explores the sig-
nificance of the hermaphrodite in different
aspects of society, as reflected in the medi-
cal treatises of Ambroise Pare, Caspar Bau-
hin, and Jacques Duval, the philosophical
alchemy works of Clovis Hesteau de Nuyse-
ment, lyric poetry by Theodore Agrippa
DAubigne, political pamphlets, and a sati-
rical novel by Thomas Artus (Description
de lIsle des Hermaphrodites, ca. 1598).
What unites this choice of texts, says
Long, is the profoundly conservative yet
profoundly revolutionary effect that this
paradoxical figure engenders: by uniting
the fundamental division of the sexes into
one, the hermaphrodite both calls into
question natural boundaries between
male/female, active/passive, governing/ru-
led, while at the same time reasserting their
necessary opposition. By doing so, the her-
BOOK REVIEWS
maphrodite lends itself to representing all
struggles between stridently opposing
forces. Depending on its use and context,
it may consequently appear as the evil to
be eliminated in order to re-establish social
or natural orders in a state of crisis (as is the
case of the political pamphlets condemning
the royal hermaphrodite Henri III of
France) as easily as it may suggest an open-
ing to creative synthesis and rebirth based
on new configurations of the gendered
poles (as the figure appears in the lyric po-
etry of the poets belonging to his court).
The fluidity of exchange between male
and female in alchemical works by Paracel-
sus, like the difficulty of establishing a sin-
gle gender for some individuals with partial-
ly developed genitalia of both sexes,
implicitly called into question the natural-
ness of the binary opposition. This thesis
is clearly worked out in the legal case of Ma-
rin LeMarcis who was saved from being
burned alive thanks to Jacques Duvals em-
pirical observations, in direct opposition to
the opinion of the other medical experts
who were called to testify, based on distant
visual clues suggested by ancient sources ra-
ther than on tactile evidence (a case discus-
sed by Michel Foucault in his Les Anor-
maux lectures given in 1974). By revealing
the inadequacy of the two-sex model when
faced with a real intersexual body, the
hermaphrodite pointed to the imaginary
nature of the sexes, to the cultural, arbitrary
dimension of sexual designation in itself.
This is its intrinsically revolutionary effect.
What these texts ultimately have in com-
mon, then, explains Long, is that they use
words, images, and categories to demon-
strate the resistance of the body to significa-
tion and in order to subvert the politics of
interpretation: the gap between theory and
reality demonstrates the inefficacy of theo-
retical discourse (p. 23).
What better theoretical discourse to use
for analyzing the historical hermaphrodite
than contemporary gender theory, then?
Ideally, according to this logic, a study of
hermaphrodites in Renaissance Europe
should serve to reflect back on the postmo-
dern gender theories that the author is pro-
379
posing, in the same way the texts of the past
serve to illuminate the gender theories of
the sixteenth-century authors being exami-
ned. Unfortunately, this ideal is not fulfilled
in Longs exposition: the theoretical appa-
ratus and basic definitions of the key terms
she employs, such as gender, are scarcely
alluded to, apart from occasional citations
from Judith Lorbers Paradoxes of Gender
(1994), Judith Butlers Gender Trouble
(1990), and Donna Harraways Cyborgs, Si-
mians, and Women (1989), all of which
speak for a previous scholarly generation
that came to the forefront in the Anglo-Sa-
xon world during the socio-political crisis of
feminism.
The outdatedness of Longs interpretative
discourse does not respond to our needs for
a renewed understanding of hermaphrodites
in our liquid, fluid, artificially natural pos-
thuman era. The lack of a fully developed
sense of historicization and historical metho-
dology also undermines the interdisciplinary
aims of the study: it is neither theoretically
adventurous nor historically rigorous, thus
remaining of interest primarily to literary
scholars of sixteenth-century France.
ZAKIYA HANAFI
AD MESKENS, Joannes della Faille S.J.: Ma-
thematics, Modesty, Missed Opportuni-
ties. Brussels and Rome: Istituto Storico
Belga di Roma (Commercial distribution
Brepols Publishers), 2005. 177 pp., ISBN
90-74461-53-0.
In his partially successful struggle to se-
cure mathematics a prominent place in the
Jesuit curriculum, Christoph Clavius, pro-
fessor of mathematics at the Collegio Roma-
no from 1565 to 1612, particularly insisted
on the utility of the discipline. The book
by Ad Meskens, which is devoted to the
Flemish Jesuit Joannes della Faille (1597-
1652), provides us with a vivid example of
the variety of intellectual and practical tasks
to which a seventeenth-century mathemati-
cian could be called.