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. François Soyer uses Maria’s 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 Maria’s 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.
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. François Soyer uses Maria’s 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 Maria’s 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.
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Chronology of the Life and Trial of Maria Duran
List of Abbreviations
Maps
Introduction
Part I: The Remarkable Life of Maria Duran
1. The Fugitive Wife from a Small Village in the Pyrenees
2. Maria Becomes a Soldier
3. Maria Duran Travels to Lisbon
4. Sex and Suspicion in the Recolhimentos of Lisbon
5. The Nuns and Novices of Our Lady of Paradise
6. Enter the Inquisition
7. Maria on Trial
8. “A Real Woman and Not a Hermaphrodite”: The Anatomical
Examination of Maria Duran
9. Torture, Verdict and Punishment
10. Maria on Display: the Auto-da-fé of 21 June 1744
Part II: The Maria Duran Mystery: Transgressive Sexuality,
Transing Gender and Gender Performativity in the Trial of Maria
Duran
Epilogue
Bibliography
Index
An exploration of the life of Maria Duran – a woman accused of being a man who was put on trial for sorcery by the Portuguese Inquisition – and what it reveals about early modern gender norm transgressions.
François 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 1517–1914: Revolutions, 1715–1789 (2021) and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.
This is a book one cannot put down! Soyer’s 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 Ginzburg’s 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*
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