Island of Hermaphrodites

Kathleen Perry Long is professor of French at Cornell University. She is the author of Hermaphrodites in Renaissance Europe, High Anxiety: Masculinity in Crisis in Early Modern France, and Gender and Scientific Discourse in Early Modern Europe.

• AcknowledgmentsList of IllustrationsIntroduction—Historical Context—The Work: Assumed Author, Characters—Scholarly and Critical Approaches—The World of the Court—The Setting—Clothing and Gender in the French Court—The Laws—The Banquet: Galenic Dietetics and Court LifePolitical TreatisesReceptionEstablishing the TextApproaches to TranslationText—The Island of Hermaphrodites, Newly Discovered—Summary of the Laws, Statutes, Customs, and Decrees of the Hermaphrodites—The Banquet —Against Hermaphrodites—On the Sovereign Good of Man—That the Soul of Man Should be Concerned with Temporal Things—ConclusionBibliographyIndex

“Long’s rich introduction gestures to these and many more queer readings of The Island of Hermaphrodites, a text that remains prodigiously peculiar. Long’s translation finally makes it available to many more readers. Even French readers will appreciate Long’s meticulous scholarship in contextualizing the text.”