Introduction

Abstract

The androgyne is seen in this study as the locus of a set of ideas functioning in Renaissance France, informing and expressing aspects of its worldview. It will be useful to clarify from the start that the words androgyne and hermaphrodite have a long history during which they have as often as not been treated as synonyms and used interchangeably. The slightest consideration of their etymology reveals how reasonable this conflation is. For the purpose of this study however, flying in the face of more than two millennia of synonymy, I will impose a clear distinction between the signified of these two signifiers. The hermaphrodite is perhaps best known from the description in Ovid’s Metamorphoses (4.375–79) of the melded bodies of Salmacis and Hermaphroditus (whose name, combining those of his parents, Hermes and Aphrodite, adumbrates his fate). His metamorphosis comes in response to Salmacis’s plea to the gods when Hermaphroditus fails to respond to her advances; the result of the metamorphosis, Ovid tells us, is a blended creature “who seemed neither, yet both” (4.379). This hermaphrodite models a state of combined bodies, imperfection, and ever-yet-unsatisfied desire. In the Renaissance, in both French and Italian, the word hermaphrodite also came to signify homosexual. So, for example, in Leone Ebreo’s Dialoghi d’amore, we learn that the term can refer to “those who love men and have no shame in being both active and passive.