The Shape of Sex: Nonbinary Gender from Genesis to the Renaissance (Columbia University Press, 2021) is a field-shaping work. The book argues, and persuasively demonstrates, that many early Christian and early medieval writers did not have a binary view of gender and accepted hermaphrodites as part of God’s plan; indeed, people might hope to be nonbinary in Heaven. The rupture, DeVun argues, came in the late twelfth and thirteenth century. They analyse the resulting hostility to hermaphrodites as a result of a hostility to religious others developed through ethnography and natural science. In late medieval alchemy, DeVun demonstrates that hermaphroditism or androgyny became an important positive concept. The book does not just deal with the work of intellectuals, it also looks at the law in practice and how actual gender-nonconforming people were treated. The book includes a wide range of material on history of science, medicine, theology, ethnography, the Crusades, Jews, social history, animal studies, and more, over a period of more than a thousand years.

This is the first book by a medieval historian to discuss nonbinary people or indeed any subset of trans people. Even if the number of nonbinary people was relatively small, but medieval thinkers across a variety of fields devoted a great deal of attention to them, so they are disproportionately important to the ways in which bodies and indeed the nature of the human were understood. Medievalists always like to claim their work has contemporary relevance, and most of the time it is a stretch. In this case it is not. By presenting these issues in all their complexity in the deep past, DeVun shows how rooted modern attitudes are in a set of sometimes hostile but sometimes remarkably open traditions. They articulate particularly clearly the complications of a set of discourses in which sex, gender, and sexuality are all collapsed into one concept, ‘sexus’, and gender difference is at one and the same time binary and on a spectrum.

The book is extremely timely. Trans studies is very much of this academic moment, but it was not when DeVun began their work on the topic; they have shaped and continue to shape the field as it intersects with medieval studies. The panel will, in particular, build on the book’s discussion of the way modern theoretical work in the field bears or does not bear on the Middle Ages.

A work that so upends the history of gender as it has been understood, for the medieval period with implications extending into the present, is worth highlighting and further analysing. This roundtable will offer a discussion of the work and the contributions it makes to the study of historical gender studies, by an interdisciplinary group of scholars whose interests lie in different aspects of the many fields this capacious work touches upon: art history, Byzantine studies, the history of medicine, the history of sexuality, and trans studies. The discussants include cis, trans, and nonbinary people.